World War I Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  A letter Ivor wrote to Annie in October/November 1924, by which time he was living in a Gloucestershire mental hospital.

  Ivor in 1920: he was suffering from the aftereffects of the horrific sights he had seen in France and the gas attack he’d been caught up in, as well as sorrow over the failure of his relationship with Annie. He described his mental illness as “neurasthenia”—an exhaustion of the nerves.

  Ivor’s mental health continued to be delicate after the war and in September 1922 his family had him committed to Barnwood House mental hospital in Gloucester, where he lived until his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-seven. In 1924 he tried once more to contact Annie, prevailing on Marion to write to her mother, but the reply came that Annie had emigrated to the US in 1921 and was living with her husband in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

  Life had not been kind to Ivor. Although his poems and music received universal acclaim, his life in the asylum was torture for a man who loved open countryside and the society of his friends. Life was not kind to Annie either. Soon after she arrived in Wellesley with her Scottish husband, Sgt. James McKay, another patient she had cared for at Bangour Hospital, there was a fire in their house from which Annie managed to save only a few photographs, her nursing certificates, and the book of poems Ivor had sent her in 1918. In 1931 their seven-year-old son John was killed by a runaway truck while playing in front of their home. And in the 1950s, Annie’s mental health deteriorated to the extent that she had to spend the last eight years of her life in hospital.

  Life had not been kind to Ivor. Although his poems and music received universal acclaim, his life in the asylum was torture.

  Annie and Ivor’s love had been sweet and true during the winter of 1917–18, and if she decided not to commit herself to a man with mental health problems whom she had only known for six months, one who couldn’t visit her because he’d lost his last ten-pound note, then who can blame her? But it seems Annie never forgot her lively, talented fiancé. After her death, her daughter Peggy Ann looked through the old leather suitcase in which she kept all her most precious belongings and found the score of a song cycle, “Western Playland,” that Ivor had dedicated to Annie, along with the inscribed book of poems she had saved from the fire.

  WAR POETS

  Rupert Brooke was known as the first of the war poets but in fact his famously patriotic works, such as “The Soldier” (“If I should die, think only this of me;/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England.”), were written without him seeing any action. He died in April 1915 of an infected mosquito bite while on his way to Gallipoli. The poets who described the horrors of the trenches and were fiercely critical of the war included Wilfred Owen (who wrote “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” with the opening line, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?”); Siegfried Sassoon (“The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still”); Herbert Read, who wrote about a deserter in “The Execution of Cornelius Vane”; and Ivor Gurney (in “The Silent One” he wrote of a soldier “Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two”). These poets shared a skepticism about religion. If God existed, they asked, why did he allow men to suffer so?

  Rupert Brooke, known as the first of the war poets, did not live to witness the war, after dying on his way to Gallipoli.

  Max

  ERNST

  &

  Luise

  STRAUS-ERNST

  Married: October 7, 1918

  A German poster encouraging men to enlist: “Your Fatherland is in Danger,” it reads.

  Max had already won some acclaim as an artist before the war began.

  Max Ernst

  GERMAN

  Born: April 2, 1891

  Rank & regiment: Lieutenant, 36th Regiment, Rhineland Field Artillery

  Luise Straus

  GERMAN

  Born: December 2, 1893

  Members of the Dadaist Society in Cologne in 1919: From left to right, Hans Hansen, Max Ernst, Luise Straus, her brother Richard, and Alfred Grünewald. “To us Dada was above all a moral reaction … A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence,” they wrote in the review Der Ventilator.

  Luise’s family wanted her to marry a wealthy Jewish man but instead, just before the war began, she fell in love with Max, a handsome, free-spirited artist who had been raised a Catholic.

  L uise was the daughter of a Cologne hat maker and she grew up in a liberal, middle-class Jewish family. After school she studied art history at the University of Bonn and it was there, early in 1913, that she met Max, who was studying an eclectic range of subjects, including philosophy, literature, psychology, and psychiatry as well as art history. For about a year they were just casual acquaintances until one day Max sat next to Luise in the life-drawing class, a mandatory part of the art history course. Looking over her shoulder, he noticed she was struggling to complete her drawing so he surreptitiously took her pad and completed the figure for her. She already knew him as an artist whose work had appeared in a number of group exhibitions. His father Philipp was an amateur painter, and since 1909 Max had been producing his own sketches and portraits to some acclaim in avant-garde circles. He was influenced by Pablo Picasso, whose work he had seen at a 1912 exhibition in Cologne, and was also intrigued by the art produced by the mentally ill, sometimes visiting asylums to watch inmates paint.

  A bridge over the Rhine in Bonn, c. 1918. A promenade ran along the banks of the river, where Max and Luise went strolling on Sundays.

  Luise let Max walk her back to her dormitory that day and agreed to go out with him the following Sunday for a stroll along the Rhine. These strolls became a weekly event, and she often sat watching while he sketched on the riverbank. He assured her that he would never try to take her “by storm” but waited patiently for nine months, with chaste embraces his only reward, until she became sure of her feelings for him. One day he took her upriver to a point where a jetty caused the water to swirl and flow upstream and, as they held each other close, she knew she had fallen in love with him. Her parents wanted her to marry a man named Otto Keller, son of a prominent Jewish family in Cologne. With Otto, she would have financial security, and she even suggested to Max that perhaps she could marry one man and still love another. She recorded his reply in her diary: “He said that I was far too intelligent and vivacious to be buried in the mediocrity of that way of life.”

  Both watched with mounting horror the Kaiser’s militaristic posturing and then the chain of events in summer 1914 that led to Germany’s declarations of war on Russia and France, and the ultimatum to Belgium that brought Britain into the conflict. Max enlisted straightaway; as a fit young man, he had no choice in the matter. Just at the point when they declared their love for each other, Max and Luise were torn apart, and neither had any idea how long that separation would last—or, indeed, if they would ever be reunited.

  Some think the Big Bertha, a 16½ inch howitzer, got its name from Bertha Krupp, heiress to the armaments firm that built it.

  The War Years

  In his regiment, Max was trained to fire the huge field guns that were used to bombard enemy trenches before an attack over no-man’s-land. Between 1914 and 1916 he was moved around to postings on the Rivers Meuse and Marne on the Western Front, although it is not clear whether he took part in the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 when the Allies managed to halt the German offensive. Any vague patriotism Max might have felt at the war’s beginning was soon destroyed by the senseless death, random brutality, and horrific mutilation he witnessed in the trenches. Although he spent some time charting maps, an activity that gave him access to paints and allowed him to carry on with his art, he soon became very depressed.

  Every day Max wrote to Luise about the horrors he was witnessing and she wrote back trying to raise his spirits, but the letters were slow to arrive and heavily censored. Occasionally he got a furlough and could travel to Cologne, where she was still living with her parents. The time they spent together was p
recious and passionate, sealing their feelings for each other and providing Max with a yearned-for respite from the fighting. After one visit in 1916, Luise missed her monthly period and, in a panic, told her parents that she might be pregnant. They were furious, her mother warning her that Max was a fly-by-night artist who would probably never be seen again. How could she let this happen? They would never be able to show their faces in Cologne for shame. On the contrary, when he received the news in a letter from Luise, Max applied for special leave and came home wearing the full formal uniform and spiked Pickelhaube helmet in which soldiers got married. He told Luise’s parents that he was very much in love with their daughter and there was no question but that he would stand by her. In any event, the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm, but Luise and Max decided anyway that they wanted to get married after the war was over.

  In 1914, German infantrymen wore the spiked Pickelhaube helmet, with a cloth covering to stop it gleaming in the sun and betraying their position. By 1916 it had been replaced by a steel helmet.

  The fighting dragged on, and Max was there for much of the long and bloody Battle of Verdun between February and December 1916, during which German troops took Fort Douaumont from the French, only to lose it again. Estimates of the number of casualties vary, but it’s thought that at least 377,000 Frenchmen and 337,000 Germans were killed. The whole area was turned to thick, viscous mud filled with fragments of human remains. Men drowned in huge, slippery shell holes from which they were unable to climb out, and the ghostly shadows of shattered trees stood out against the sky. A French soldier, Albert Joubaire, wrote, “What a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. … Hell cannot be this dreadful.” All who were there shared his view.

  “What a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. … Hell cannot be this dreadful.”

  From November 1916 to May 1917 Max was on the Eastern Front fighting the Russians through the depths of the long, bitterly cold winter, then by June 1917 was back near the Belgian border, where he was exposed to poison gas during a British attack. He was injured twice, though not in battle. On the first occasion a horse kicked him in the head while his men were trying to shoe it; on the second, he was hit by recoil while inspecting an artillery piece and his face swelled up badly. His fellow soldiers nicknamed him, “the man with the iron head.”

  German troops attack on March 15, 1916, during the Battle of Verdun. It was the longest single battle of the war, lasting from February 21 to December 18, and saw the deaths of three quarters of a million French and German soldiers.

  In September 1917 he was transferred to the 36th Regiment of Field Artillery, which at the time was being held in reserve. At last away from the front line, Ernst was promoted to the rank of lieutenant by his commander, a commission he tried but was not allowed to refuse. Instead, he showed his disgust for the war in another way. Several weeks before the Armistice, in August or September 1918, he marched his company of soldiers away from the Front and across France and Belgium to the other side of the Rhine, then told them they were dismissed and could all go home. Far from being chastised for this act of desertion, after the war he was awarded an Iron Cross for gallantry, an honor which this time he successfully turned down. All he wanted was to get back to his painting and to marry Luise, who had waited patiently for him right through the four years he had been away.

  FOOD SHORTAGES IN GERMANY

  Britain imposed a naval blockade on Germany at the start of the war, meaning they couldn’t import certain essential products, such as crop fertilizers, cotton, and rubber. On top of that, most able-bodied men were sent to the Front, leaving few behind to tend the farms and causing a reduction in available food rations. Troops were given priority when it came to food supplies, and soon the civilian population was having to make do with rationed Kriegsbrot (war bread), made from potatoes combined with a little wheat and rye flour, and margarine made from vegetable oil in place of butter. In the winter of 1916–17 a severe frost killed the potato harvest, so turnips became a major source of nutrition. By 1918, food shortages were affecting the troops as well. Meat rations had been reduced to 12 percent of their pre-war level and finely ground sawdust was used in bread in place of flour. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians died from malnutrition and soldiers got home from the Front to find their wives and children seriously thin and undernourished.

  A German ration card in 1915. Stamps were torn off in exchange for loaves of bread.

  Both families were bitterly opposed to the marriage: Max’s parents were prominent Catholics, and Luise’s were devout Jews who doubted his ability to keep their daughter in the style to which she was accustomed. The only family members to attend their civil marriage ceremony on October 7, 1918, were Max’s brother and sister. Both sets of parents stayed away. The newlyweds rented an apartment on the top floor of a townhouse on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring in Cologne, but money was short because their parents refused to help support them and work was thin on the ground for artists and art historians in the post-war period. Max was prone to dark moods and periods of introspection or short temper, with memories of the war haunting his sleeping and waking hours. He’d had a tough war by anyone’s standards and it changed him irrevocably. He later wrote in his autobiography, “On the first of August 1914 M.[ax] E.[rnst] died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.” But Max and Luise were happy to be together at last and both were overjoyed in June 1920 when she gave birth to a son, whom they named Ulrich, but whom everyone would call Jimmy.

  DESERTION

  In the early years of the war, most soldiers remained committed to the fight, but cracks began to appear in the French Army in May and June 1917 when thousands of troops mutinied, refusing to move forward to the front lines. Of these, 3,335 soldiers were court-martialed and 449 were condemned to death, but fewer than a tenth of these were actually executed. During the war, 3,080 British soldiers were sentenced to death, most of them for desertion, but only 307 were shot while the rest were shipped off to the colonies. It’s now believed that many deserters were suffering from shellshock and in some countries they have since been posthumously pardoned. In 1916, thousands of Czechs deserted; during 1917 tens of thousands of Russians ran off; then in December 1917, 300,000 Turkish soldiers left their lines. By the end of August 1918, with acute food shortages and plummeting morale, desertion from the German Army was becoming common and Max was not alone in heading home several weeks before the Armistice.

  German deserters cross the frozen River Meuse into Holland searching for refuge from the fighting.

  Art over Love

  The Dadaist movement had begun in Zurich in 1916 as an intellectual protest against the war and what its founders saw as the petty rules of bourgeois society, but in Germany in 1919 it became a style of art characterized by nihilist images created using techniques such as collage and montage. Encouraged by his friend Hans (better known as Jean) Arp, Max began to create bizarre collages full of dreamlike images of violence and religious and sexual imagery. Along with a number of colleagues he founded a Cologne branch of the Dadaist movement and Luise became its secretary. Soon their apartment was overrun by visiting artists, poets, and art critics, who slept wherever they could find a space. Luise became the hostess whose job it was to find food for these peripatetic house guests; to make ends meet she took odd jobs, selling hosiery at the Tietz department store, or typing in offices. A nanny called Maja was hired to look after their little boy, while Max and Jean organized Cologne’s first Dada exhibition, a strange event set in a pub, which was entered through a men’s urinal, and at which obscene poetry was read aloud by a woman wearing a Communion dress. The provocative, anti-religious imagery of the exhibits managed to upset both Max’s and Luise’s parents even more than ever. Undeterred, Luise devoted all her efforts to supporting Max in his endeavors, sublimating her own life to his and pandering to his volatile mood swings.

  The opening of the exhibition “Dada Max Ernst” at the Au Sans Pareil gallery
in Paris on May 2, 1921, was attended by leading poets and intellectuals.

  Around this time the French artist Paul Éluard came to stay, along with his wife Gala. When they talked about the war, he and Max discovered they had both been at the Battle of Verdun on opposite sides, firing at each other, a revelation that underlined for them the obscenity and absurdity of the entire conflict. The two couples began to spend time together and it wasn’t long before Luise was forced to accept that Max had fallen in love with Gala. Soon he announced he was going to Paris to live with Paul and Gala in a ménage à trois, leaving Luise and Maja to bring up little Jimmy. Luise must have been desperately upset but she wasn’t bitter, telling her son in later life, “He was an unusual man, to whom the ordinary rules of life and behavior were less important than his work.” Perhaps she also recognized the damage done to him by the war, which had made him capable of a selfishness and cruelty that had never been part of his nature before.

  Max Ernst (left) with Gala and Paul Éluard in Austria, 1922. In 1929 she fell in love with Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, ten years her junior, whom she married in 1934.