Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  It is the little Grant Richard’s [sic] edition and I have it yet – its boards now fallen away from its ‘innards’. There’s no name, but the ring of a cup bottom is on the cover – a cup of tea has stood on it – by some camp bed I fancy. There is a writing though –

  ‘Barrage lifts on the first objective 4.55.’

  It is written in indelible pencil which has run a little.

  Darling remembered two men in particular who carried copies of the book with them: ‘one – Hopper or Cooper – went out [i.e. died] in a raid some time in May up by the Vimy. The other was a Staff man, but when I saw it and remarked on it he had nothing to say. Was it too much for him or too little?’ ‘I first read A Shropshire Lad on the Messines Ridge,’ another soldier recalled. ‘A new officer said to me one evening, “Have you read this?”, and he drew from his pocket a long, narrow, red edition of A Shropshire Lad. From that time I was a devotee of the great Housman.’ The writer and editor A. St John Adcock was not a combatant, but he reported that when he was ‘on a visit to the front in France and Belgium, during the war, the three volumes of verse that were greatly in demand among the soldiers of the new Army, down at the rest camps, were Browning’s “Men and Women”, Omar Khayyâm, and that excellent pocket edition of “The Shropshire Lad”’. Housman himself suggested that the book’s popularity after the war was ‘because so many soldiers, including at least one V.C., carried it in their pockets, and thus others got to know of it and bought it when they came home’.

  After the war Housman received a letter from an American soldier that he kept for the rest of his life. The American related that he had been tending a wounded British soldier in France and had offered him his copy of A Shropshire Lad to read while he was recuperating. ‘The man smiled and took from under his pillow a copy of his own, all tattered, torn and blood-stained. It had been in his pocket throughout the War from 1914, and he had written in it three other Housman poems’ – presumably three of those published during the war. Housman’s nephew Clement, who true to his uncle’s poems ‘had almost a hope and expectation of dying in battle’, had similarly written out ‘Her strong enchantments failing’ (which had not at that point been published) in order to take it with him to the war.

  It is easy to see why these poems were carried to the front. They were, after all, young men’s poems, and the feelings they describe were intensified in wartime: close masculine friendships; a sense that life is unjust and that fate is against one; the notion that life is passing all too quickly and that death is always standing by, ready to harvest the young. As St John Adcock put it:

  It is not so curious as it may seem at first blush that ‘The Shropshire Lad’, with its philosophically pessimistic outlook, should appeal to those men who had been in the firing line and were shortly going up again. For what is loosely called its pessimism is not so much that as a courageously stoical acceptance of the stern facts of human experience. The soldier who could find any pleasure at all in verse was in no mood, just then, for gracious sentiments or optimistic fantasies; he was up against stark realities; accustomed to the sight of death and the thought of its immanence [sic, for imminence], had shed nearly all his illusions, found a fearful and perhaps morbid joy in treating such things as a grim jest, and the honest facing of the truth in ‘The Shropshire Lad’, its wry, whimsical, indomitable realism, must have chimed with his own thoughts and strengthened him to endure that fate that is, in the long run, common to all men.

  The journalist and publisher Holbrook Jackson tells an anecdote about an acquaintance who had been obliged to return to England because his business affairs in Central America had been affected by the war. When Jackson asked him how he was passing his time, the man replied: ‘I am staying down at a military encampment near London, reading A Shropshire Lad to the soldiers, and, by gad! don’t they love it!’ A reason for this, Jackson suggests, is that many of the volume’s poems ‘move to the sound of bugles, and all of them are robust […] Housman’s soldier is brave in the great spirit.’

  Dreams of England

  Another reason that Housman’s poems proved so popular during the war was that they were written not for a literary élite but for the ordinary reader. Their appeal, as Housman frequently suggested, was to the heart rather than the head, and those journeying abroad to face certain danger often wanted something to provide solace rather than intellectual stimulation. The unchanging, archetypal English landscape that Housman wrote about reminded soldiers of home, wherever that may have been. It seemed to matter little where combatants actually lived: the ‘England’ they were fighting for was more often than not portrayed as rural. ‘They were summoned from the hillside, / They were called in from the glen’ ran the opening lines of ‘Keep the home fires burning’, one of the war’s most popular songs, rather as if no recruiting had taken place in urban areas. A well-known poster published in 1915 depicts a kilted soldier, standing beneath the slogan ‘YOUR COUNTRY’S CALL’, gesturing towards an idealised landscape of small rolling hills criss-crossed with hedges and dotted with cattle, through which country lanes wind past thatched cottages covered with roses and surrounded by hollyhocks and dovecotes. ‘Isn’t this worth fighting for?’ the poster demands: ‘ENLIST NOW’. Not only was this not the kind of environment in which most potential recruits had grown up, it was also – despite the Highland soldier, who if he hadn’t been raised in a city tenement would more likely have looked out over lochs and glens – a generically English image. Similarly, the view from the window in another well-known poster, ‘WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY – GO!’, is of soldiers marching not through an urban street but against a backdrop of bosky downs. ‘I always feel that I am fighting for England,’ wrote Lieutenant Christian Carver to his brother from France in 1917. ‘English fields, lanes, trees, English atmosphere, and good days in England.’ As the poet Charles Hamilton Sorley put it: ‘England remains the dream, the background: at once the memory and the ideal.’

  In October 1914 Edward Thomas had written to his agent to say that he wanted to compile an anthology ‘about England, English places and English life’. The agent thought the market was already flooded with such books, claiming that five had been published in the last week. Thomas’s intention was to write ‘an account of the name of England and its meaning, especially its emotional meaning […] to show what is meant when a man speaks of England and especially since the war.’ The book would eventually appear in 1915 under the title This England. ‘This is an anthology from the works of English writers rather strictly so called,’ Thomas wrote in a prefatory note: ‘Building round a few most English poems like “When icicles hang by the wall”, – excluding professedly patriotic writing because it is generally bad and because indirect praise is sweeter and more profound, – never aiming at what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete, – I wished to make a book as full of English character and country as an egg is of meat. If I have reminded others, as I did myself continually, of some of the echoes called up by the name of England, I am satisfied.’

  The anthology is wide-ranging, including work by such obvious contenders as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens alongside folk songs and just two contemporary poets, Walter de la Mare and the completely unknown ‘Edward Eastaway’, whose ‘Haymaking’ and ‘The Manor Farm’ were in fact written by Thomas himself. True to his mission to avoid the too obviously patriotic, Thomas rejects the stirring military poems of Wolfe and Newbolt for the pastoral impressions of John Clare and Gilbert White. Although the anthology includes a section on ‘London’, this is by far the shortest, containing only seven pieces, whereas the principally rural section titled ‘Her Sweet Three Corners’ has forty-seven. (‘Euston’ here turns out not to be a description of the mighty railway station but an account of the park near Thetford laid out by John Evelyn.) Character and country are particularly aligned in ‘The Vital Commoners’, almost all of whom – Samuels Pepys and Weller apart – are country dwellers.

  If this anthology prov
ided a sense of what ‘Englishness’ meant in the winter of 1914, Thomas had a more concrete notion of the ‘England’ he would end up fighting to defend. When asked the following year why he had enlisted, he leaned down to take up a pinch of English soil and replied: ‘Literally, for this.’ In the first months of the war he had published an essay in The Nation in which he evoked a perfect rural scene in August 1914. As his anthology would be, it was titled ‘This England’, and in the final paragraph he described his feelings when looking at a new moon and imagining soldiers in France gazing up at the same sliver of light:

  It seemed to me that either I had never loved England, or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave, not having realised that it was not mine unless I were willing or prepared to die rather than leave it as Belgian women and old men and children had left their country. Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape, at the elms and poplars about the houses, at the purple-headed wood-betony with two pairs of dark leaves on a stiff stem, who stood sentinel among the grasses or bracken by hedge-side or wood’s-edge.

  The countryside that Thomas was writing about, that stood for all England, was not in Shropshire but a neighbouring county: ‘All I can say was that the name, Hereford, had somehow won in my mind a very distinct meaning; it stood out among the other county names as the most delicately rustic of them all, with a touch of nobility given it long ago, I think, by Shakespeare’s “Harry of Hereford, Lancaster and Derby”.’ Although intended as representative, this was the real landscape of Leadington that Thomas knew well from the time he spent there. Just to the north of Dymock on the Herefordshire–Gloucestershire border, it was also the place in which he forged his friendship with Robert Frost and became a poet, somewhere that was for the Dymock Poets emblematic of the England Thomas now saw being threatened.

  Siegfried Sassoon’s notion of what he might shortly be fighting for also crystallised in the depths of the English countryside. On 31 July 1914, having read in The Times that war was now unavoidable, he set out on a long bicycle ride through the Weald of Kent, where he had spent most of his life. On the return journey, he writes, ‘I found myself observing those last miles with a heightened perception of what they meant to me.’ Passing two familiar hop kilns, he felt that:

  In the reddening glow of the setting sun their kindly cowls were like sign-posts pointing towards the ominous continent of Europe. Those local kilns stood for England – for Kent, anyhow – rustically confronting whatever enemy might invade the freedom of the Hastings road […] Lit by departing day was the length and breadth of the Weald, and the message of those friendly miles was a single chord of emotion vibrating backwards across the years to my earliest rememberings. Uplifted by this awareness, I knew that here was something deeply loved, something which the unmeasurable timelessness of childhood had made my own. I saluted it with feelings of farewell.

  Taking one last lingering look across a familiar valley, ‘I said to myself that I was ready to meet whatever the war might ask of me,’ he continues. ‘The Weald had been the world of my youngness, and while I gazed across it now I felt prepared to do what I could to defend it.’

  Rupert Brooke felt something similar, though from the vantage point of Cornwall, where he was on a sailing holiday when war was declared. In an article published in the New Statesman on 29 August 1914, he wrote about the reaction of ‘a friend’ to the news that Britain and Germany were at war. Although the twenty-seven-year-old Brooke describes his protagonist as ‘a normal, even ordinary man, wholly English, twenty-four years old, active and given to music’, it is clearly a self-portrait. Having been told that Britain and Germany are at war, the young man climbs a gorse-covered hill and sits alone with his thoughts, gazing out across the sea:

  Something was growing in his heart, and he couldn’t tell what. But as he thought ‘England and Germany’ the word ‘England’ seemed to flash like a line of foam. With a sudden tightening of his heart, he realized that there might be a raid on the English coast. He didn’t imagine any possibility of it succeeding, but only of enemies and warfare on English soil. The idea sickened him. He was immensely surprised to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him a quality which he found in A______ [‘a girl he intermittently adored’], and in a friend’s honour, and scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called ‘holiness’. His astonishment grew as the full flood of ‘England’ swept over him on from thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover. Grey, uneven little fields, and small, ancient hedges rushed before him, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses.

  This is not the coastal England that the young man is sitting in, looking out to sea; it is instead the ‘for ever England’ of Brooke’s most famous poem, ‘The Soldier’. Imagining himself being buried in ‘some corner of a foreign field’, Brooke supposes:

  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.

  This poem is so well known, and has been so often pilloried, that its engagement with an idealised rural England, apparently inspired by walks around Dymock (it was first published in the Dymock Poets’ New Numbers 4), has more or less vanished amid the mythologising rhetoric with which it was associated after Brooke’s death.

  Brooke’s England is the ‘England’ that many soldiers imagined when fighting for it on foreign soil, perhaps particularly in the devastated landscapes of France and Belgium, but also in the very different terrains of Gallipoli and the Middle East. It is more or less identical to the one described by the hugely popular travel writer H.V. Morton in his best-selling In Search of England (1927), which opens with the sentence: ‘I believed that I was dying in Palestine.’ The scene is in fact set after the war, but Morton lures the reader into imagining that he is writing as a serving soldier. It describes him climbing a hill above Jerusalem and ‘turning as accurately as I could in the direction of England’, rather as a devout Muslim would face Mecca. From this vantage point

  there rose up in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in the still air and, here and there, little red blinds shining in the dusk under the thatch. I remember how the church bells ring at home, and how, at that time of year, the sun leaves a low red bar down in the west, and against it the elms grow blacker by the minute. Then the bats start to flicker like little bits of burnt paper and you hear the slow jingle of a team coming home from the fields … When you think like this sitting alone in a foreign country I think you know all there is to learn about heartache.

  This is not the landscape in which Morton grew up or now lived. He was born in the industrialised Lancashire town of Ashton-under-Lyne, where ‘his earliest memories were of the sound of mill-girls’ clogs as they clattered off to work in the morning’, and moved first to Manchester at the age of five, and then to the Birmingham suburbs. At the time of writing his book he was living in London as a Fleet Street journalist, which prompts him to ask: ‘does it seem strange that a townsman should in his extremity see this picture’ of a quintessentially rural scene?

  Would it not be more reasonable to expect him to see his own city? Why did I not think of St Paul’s Cathedral or Piccadilly? I have learnt since that this vision of mine is a common one to exiles all over the world; we think of home, we long for home, but we see something greater – we see England.

  This village that symbolizes England sleeps in the sub-consciousness of many a townsman. A little London factory hand I met during the war confessed to me when pressed, and after great mental difficulty, that he visualised the England he was fighting for – th
e England of the ‘England wants YOU’ poster – as not London, not his own street, but as Epping Forest, the green place where he had spent Bank Holidays. And I think most of us did. The village and the English country-side are the germs of all we are and all we have become: our manufacturing cities belong to the last century and a half; our villages stand with their roots in the Heptarchy.

  Looking out over Jerusalem, Morton made a pledge that would have seemed familiar to many who had served in the war: ‘I took the vow that if the pain in my neck did not end for ever on the windy hills of Palestine I would go home in search of England, I would go through the lanes of England and the little thatched villages of England, and I would lean over English bridges, and lie on English grass, watching an English sky.’ It is more or less a recapitulation of Rupert Brooke.

  The popularity of Morton’s book, which by 1932 had gone through seventeen editions in five years and would become one of the best selling books published between the wars, suggests that townspeople and city dwellers did indeed associate ‘England’ with green places, either because these were where they escaped at weekends or on holiday, or because it was where their forefathers had originated before the population shifts of the late nineteenth century and so lived on in their collective consciousness. Soldiers at the front did of course think of the people they had left behind, but Ronald Blythe has observed: ‘The homesickness of the First World War was expressed more in terms of places than of people. In the literature which poured from the Western Front there is a passionate longing for the Cotswolds, the Welsh borders, certain villages and towns, the Malvern Hills – a longing fashioned and taught by poets and composers.’ Among those who fashioned this longing were Housman and the English composers who set his words, fixing in soldiers’ minds a country that was both real and imaginary and stood for all England.