Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Here of a Sunday morning

  My love and I would lie,

  And see the coloured counties,

  And hear the larks so high,

  Above us in the sky.

  The sombre conclusion of Housman’s poem is not permitted to cast its shadow over Harrison’s piece. Here instead was the spirit of a timeless England, under threat but soaring triumphantly into the skies above a peaceful landscape that had to be defended at all costs.

  V

  ENGLISH SOLDIERS

  All places, all ayres, make unto me one Country; I am in England every where, and under any meridian.

  Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

  On 30 August 1911 Winston Churchill escaped the heat of London to spend a few days at the old manor house of Mells in Somerset. Although he was Home Secretary, Churchill had retained a keen interest in international affairs since his spell in the Colonial Office, and he had spent much of Parliament’s summer recess preparing a cabinet paper on ‘Military aspects of the continental problem’. This particular problem stemmed from what would become known as the Agadir Crisis, the latest development in a long-running squabble over Morocco between France and Germany that had almost led to a European war in 1906. In a letter to Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, Churchill wrote that even in the beautiful surroundings of Somerset in that famously lovely summer he ‘could not think of anything else but the peril of war’: ‘Sitting on a hilltop in the smiling country which stretches round Mells, the lines I have copied […] kept running through my mind.’ Those lines were the first two verses of Housman’s ‘On the idle hill of summer’ (XXXV). They clearly stuck with Churchill, for he was to quote them again as the epigraph to his chapter on Agadir in The World Crisis 1911–1914, published in 1923. This was the first part of what would become a massive three-volume book about the First World War, and when in February 1931 he published a single-volume abridgement as The World Crisis, 1911–1918, he used the two stanzas as the epigraph for the entire book.

  Foreseeing the Somme

  Though it may have sounded of the moment, Housman’s poem had in fact been written in October 1895. It is one of several verses in A Shropshire Lad that are about the military calling and were partly inspired by the soldiering experiences of the poet’s youngest brother, Herbert. ‘One feels Housman foresaw the Somme,’ Robert Lowell remarked, and these poems appear both to anticipate the First World War and to bridge the gap between a long English tradition of military verse and a very different way of writing about warfare that came to be known as ‘war poetry’. The poem ends with Housman’s hilltop idler joining the colours in full knowledge of his likely fate:

  East and west on fields forgotten,

  Bleach the bones of comrades slain

  Lovely lads and dead and rotten;

  None that go return again.

  Far the calling bugles hollo,

  High the screaming fife replies,

  Gay the files of scarlet follow:

  Woman bore me, I will rise.

  If the line ‘Lovely lads and dead and rotten’ appears to anticipate the writing of such war poets as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it is the ‘scarlet’ that places the poem in 1895, at the time of the South African wars, rather than in 1914. By the outbreak of the First World War men no longer marched away to the battlefields wearing the traditional scarlet in which earlier generations had fought. The red jackets were reputedly designed to disguise the blood of the wounded, but they made soldiers easy targets and this colourful uniform had been replaced by khaki. It is a curious fact, and a nice coincidence, that khaki dye was originally made from damsons, which were widely grown for this purpose rather than for eating in both Shropshire and Worcestershire. As the Shropshire-based gardening writer Katherine Swift put it, soldiers ‘marched off to Gallipoli and the Somme with the khaki of Shropshire damsons on their backs’ – though the demand was such that this natural dye was soon replaced by a chemical one.

  Soldiering had traditionally been a means of escape from the daily grind for both the urban and the rural poor, and the recruiting sergeants Housman saw in the marketplace on his way to school in Bromsgrove had been familiar figures for several centuries. The most famous literary representation of this role was George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which two captains and a sergeant attempt to drum up army volunteers in Shrewsbury. Farquhar based his comedy on his own spell as a recruiting officer in Shropshire in 1704, and in his ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, which he addressed ‘To all friends round the Wrekin’ (a traditional Shropshire toast), he wrote:

  ’Twas my good fortune to be ordered some time ago into the place which is made the scene of this comedy. I was a perfect stranger to everything in Salop but its character of loyalty, the number of its inhabitants, the alacrity of the gentlemen in recruiting the army, with their generous and hospitable reception of strangers.

  This character I found so amply verified in every particular, that you made recruiting, which is the greatest fatigue upon earth to others, to be the greatest pleasure in the world to me.

  The kingdom cannot show better bodies of men, better inclinations for the service, more generosity, more good understanding, nor more politeness than is to be found at the foot of the Wrekin.

  Given that Farquhar had used several people he had met in Shrewsbury as models for his characters, this generous tribute to the county and its people was perhaps wise; but the Salopians of his acquaintance share many of the qualities attributed to the Shropshire lads in Housman’s poems.

  A rather different view of military service was provided some ninety years later by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the sermon he gave to Shrewsbury’s Unitarian congregation, as reported by Hazlitt:

  He made a poetical and pastoral excursion, – and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, ‘as though he should never be old,’ and the same poor country-lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummerboy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood.

  Though the tone is very far from that of Housman (Coleridge was preaching at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when country lads were being press-ganged rather than volunteering to serve their country), the setting and vocabulary here startlingly suggest Housman Country avant la lettre, even down to the ever-youthful ploughboy who anticipates Housman’s ‘lads that will never be old’ just down the road in Ludlow.

  It was precisely the finery Coleridge so deplores that caught Housman’s eye when he went on his trip to London as a schoolboy and admired the statue of Mercury in the British Museum. ‘I think of all I have seen, what most impressed me is – the Guards,’ he had written to his stepmother. ‘This may be barbarian, but it is true.’ On the cusp of sixteen, Housman was rather too old to retain the small boy’s traditional enthusiasm for soldiers, and it is unclear just how innocent his interest was. It certainly seems less innocent when in ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’ (XXII) ‘A single redcoat turns his head’ to look directly back at the admiring poet. One does not find this kind of glance, this kind of exchange, in Kipling.

  Housman’s knowledge of military life came largely from Herbert. ‘The only one of the five brothers without studious inclinations’, as Kate tactfully put it, Herbert gave up medical studies as soon as he reached his majority in 1889 in order to enlist as a private in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He may not have been an intellectual – at King Edward’s he won prizes for sporting events rather than for Latin – but he was a lively writer of letters, and those he sent home from postings abroad gave his brother many insights into the often hard lives of ordinary soldiers. Herbert was serving in Burma when in 1892 Housman sent him a copy of Kipling’s just-published first volume of Barrack-Room Ballads as a twenty-fourth birthday p
resent. ‘The book that Alfred has sent me has been a delight to myself & comrades ever since I got it,’ Herbert wrote home. ‘There never was a man, & I should think never will be again, who understands “Tommy Atkins” in the rough, as he does.’ Kipling was a journalist rather than a soldier, but he had moved in army circles at all levels while working in India and he did indeed thoroughly empathise with – and in these poems, which are written in an approximation of Cockney, quite literally give a voice to – ‘Tommy’, the professional ranker:

  I went into the theatre as sober as could be,

  They gave a drunk civilian room, but ’adn’t none for me;

  They sent me to the gallery or round the music-’alls;

  But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls …

  ‘Probably you would find it difficult to understand his inimitable mixture of soldiers’ slang & Hindustanee,’ Herbert told his stepmother, ‘& it is also, of course, essentially a man’s book.’ A man’s book it may have been, but it was hugely popular among the wider reading public, and many of the poems, such as ‘Tommy’, ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Danny Deever’, became popular recital pieces. Herbert was the son of a middle-class solicitor and so did not talk in the way Kipling’s soldiers do; but many of those he served alongside would have done. A large number of the poems in this first volume of Barrack-Room Ballads were set in India, where Herbert had also served, and these along with ‘Mandalay’ and ‘Gentleman-Ranker’, which is what he had served as, would have struck a particular chord. It was also a nice coincidence that Herbert’s regiment was popularly known as the Greenjackets because their uniforms were dyed a dark camouflage colour called ‘rifle-green’, and this is mentioned by Kipling in another of the volume’s poems, ‘Soldier, Soldier’.

  It is ‘Soldier, Soldier’ that seems faintly echoed in Housman’s own most Kiplingesque poem, ‘The New Mistress’ (XXXIV). Whereas in Kipling’s poem a returning soldier is urging the girlfriend of a dead comrade to ‘go look for a new love’, in Housman’s the soldier, having been given the brush-off by his lover, takes the army itself as his ‘new mistress’. Housman borrows the poem’s metre and rhyme scheme from the verses of ‘Tommy’, but while he represents the speech patterns of a ranker, his Shropshire lad speaks in an accentless English:

  ‘I will go where I am wanted, to a lady born and bred

  Who will dress me free for nothing in a uniform of red…’

  Elsewhere in the book, Housman adopts the viewpoint of a romantic onlooker – though one perfectly aware of the cost of war – and it is this viewpoint that particularly sets him apart from Kipling.

  Housman reported that when he submitted his poems to their original publisher, the company’s manager ‘was particularly captivated with the military element; so much so that he wanted me at first to make the whole affair, with Herbert’s assistance, into a romance of enlistment. I had to tell him this would probably take me another thirty-six years. The next thing was, he thought it would be well to have a design on the cover representing a yokel in a smock frock with a bunch of recruiting-sergeant’s ribbons in his hat.’ Housman resisted this notion, and the volume’s military element remained small though pervasive. Last Poems would be far more military in its themes than A Shropshire Lad: its first eight poems all feature soldiers, perhaps because Herbert had been killed in action in October 1901 while serving in South Africa, but also because the volume was assembled in the wake of the First World War, in which Housman had lost a nephew. A Shropshire Lad itself opens with a poem about soldiers, ‘1887’, which salutes the Salopians who have died for the Empire, those ‘Shropshire names’ inscribed on tombstones in Asia and ‘the Severn’s dead’ lying beside the Nile. More specifically, these soldiers are ‘Lads of the Fifty-third’, which is to say the 53rd (Shropshire) Regiment of Foot, which in the Childers army reforms of 1881 had been reorganised as the King’s Light Infantry (Shropshire Regiment). In ‘The Recruit’, which stands third in the volume, a Shropshire lad is encouraged to leave his home town of Ludlow and enlist in the colours. This urging is done in full knowledge of both the demands and the dangers of soldiering already outlined in the volume’s first poem: as in ‘1887’, the best a soldier can hope for if he dies is that he will be remembered by his friends. The heroic impulse is also urged in ‘The Day of Battle’ (LVI), though rather more pragmatically since it suggests that death is inevitable whether one stands to fight or runs away in the heat of battle. It begins with a bugle call echoing, as it were, from ‘On the idle hill of summer’. The difference is in the response, for this lad is already and reluctantly on the battlefield rather than safely dreaming in the English countryside, where the sound of a similarly ‘far’ bugle causes the hearer to enlist.

  While ‘The New Mistress’, ‘The Day of Battle’ and ‘On the idle hill of summer’ are spoken in the voices of soldiers, the more poignant poems look on from a distance with a mixture of envy and pity. The one that particularly caught the imagination of the First World War generation, and is frequently cited as if it were a First World War poem, is ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’ (XXIII). Its vivid concluding lines, in particular, brought some measure of comfort to those mourning the loss of young men:

  They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,

  The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

  As the bugle call in ‘The Day of Battle’ looks back to the one in ‘On the idle hill of summer’, so the Ludlow setting of this poem looks back to ‘The Recruit’. Housman placed it in the volume immediately after ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, and in both poems the speaker stands apart from, but longs to be part of, the groups of men he describes. There is a distinct wistfulness in the glance exchanged between the speaker and the soldier in the first poem, two men separated not only by the gulf that always lies between the soldier and the civilian, but almost certainly also by class, and possibly by desire – though the ambiguity here adds to the poem’s tension: ‘What thoughts at heart have you and I / We cannot stop to tell’. When Housman writes ‘Such leagues apart the world’s ends are, / We’re like to meet no more’ there is perhaps an acknowledgement that the two men themselves are leagues apart already. It is also possible, particularly in view of Herbert’s career, that this soldier’s final destination is India, and Housman’s awareness of those leagues between Britain and the subcontinent was made acute because they were what separated him from Moses Jackson. The speaker ends the poem by wishing the soldier well, just as in the poem that follows it in the volume he stands aloof from the Ludlow lads and yearns to ‘wish them farewell / And watch them depart on the way that they will not return’. The tone, however, is entirely different, perhaps because these lads are still civilians, like the speaker. Indeed, although the poem is generally treated as war poetry, there is nothing specific in it to suggest that the ‘glory’ they will die in is military: it could simply be the glory of youth, a notion that would be very familiar to a classicist such as Housman. To that extent, the poem relates more closely to such verses as ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ (XIX), which also gained an additional resonance during the First World War because many of those young men who died in it were celebrated in their obituaries as gifted sportsmen who had carried the values of the playing field onto the battlefield.

  It was the war itself that made Housman a war poet. At the time he was writing, what we now think of as war poetry barely existed. This is not to say that no one wrote poems about warfare; indeed, some of the most famous poems in the language took incidents of war as their subject: Wolfe’s ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’, Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’. These were not, however, poems written in the heat of battle, or even in snatched moments of peace behind the front line, as war poetry would be. Byron apart, these were not men who had seen, or would ever see, military action. Wol
fe was an Irish clergyman in County Tyrone; Newbolt was a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, rather than a public-school officer in the Sudan; and Tennyson wrote his famous poem at some considerable distance from the Crimea, while living on the Isle of Wight. Even Byron had yet to do any soldiering when he wrote his poem – which in any case describes the most safely distant of all these battles: one that took place in 701 BC. This is not to accuse these poets of being armchair warriors; it is merely to say that there is a difference between ‘military verse’ written by distant onlookers and ‘war poetry’ written by people on the ground. This distance between the military poet and the action he imagines is starkly acknowledged by William Makepeace Thackeray in his Crimean War poem ‘The Due of the Dead’:

  I sit beside my peaceful hearth,

  With curtain drawn and lamp trimmed bright

  I watch my children’s noisy mirth;

  I drink in home, and its delight.

  I sip my tea, and criticise

  The war, from flying rumour caught;

  Trace on the map to curious eyes,

  How here they marched, and there they fought.

  […]

  Meanwhile o’er Alma’s bloody plain

  The scathe of battle has rolled by –

  The wounded writhe and groan – the slain

  Lie naked staring to the sky.

  The First World War changed all this, chiefly because it was not, as had previously been the custom, fought in far-off places by professionals; instead, much of it was fought just across the English Channel by civilian volunteers and conscripts, most of whom were far better educated than Kipling’s Tommies as a result of the Education Acts of the nineteenth century. Literacy had spread, and the founding of popular and widely available newspapers meant that the population was far more aware of what was going on in the world than had previously been the case. Most of the soldier-poets were of the officer class, expensively educated at public schools, but even an East End working-class ranker such as Isaac Rosenberg had been given the basic tools to become a writer and record his experiences.