Sir Herbert Read
CHRIS RIDDELL – Illustrator and author
FROM DRAWN FROM MEMORY
Martha had very strict ideas of what was right and proper. Honest as the day, she entertained no compromise – things were right or wrong. A Primitive Methodist from the Welsh borders, she loved to talk of the chapel to us children, or to sing us the hymn tunes that she herself had learnt as a child. Sitting by the fire in the nursery, or later in the playroom, she would sing the simple Methodist hymns to us, while Cyril was poring over his beloved stamps and I, perhaps, was drawing in my copy-book. Ethel learnt to play some of these hymns on the piano; she was quick at picking up tunes, and our little piping voices would sing them together.
When He cometh, when He cometh
To make up His jewels,
All His Jewels, precious jewels,
Bright gems of His crown.
Twenty-nine years later I was to hear the words of those hymn tunes again. They were sung by Welsh voices on a dusty shell-torn road in Picardy, as a battalion of Welch Fusiliers marched into battle. I was standing by the roadside, close to what had been Fricourt, when they passed. I was grateful for their song. It seemed as if the men were singing a requiem. For that day I had found my dear brother’s grave in Mansell Copse. The spot was marked by simple wooden crosses bearing the names of the Fallen roughly printed on them. It was, and is still, the resting place of over two hundred men of the Devons who fell that Saturday morning in July 1916.
‘They will shine like the Morning’
E. H. Shepard
FLORA FERGUSSON – Student
‘GONE’
Written by families upon some gravestones in cemeteries near Ypres, where I went three years ago, were touching messages such as ‘God gives and He takes away. We will miss Jim’. But the one that struck me hardest was a simple ‘Gone’. Aged twelve at the time, I found it difficult to digest this word, engraved into the headstone of a dead man. Why would a family have chosen to write something so cold and stark? In a way, over the past three years I think I have come to understand. After the First World War, hundreds of thousands of bodies were never recovered, so they were literally ‘gone’. But in a deeper sense, the war wiped out the hope and joy people had carried with them. That too was gone.
Lots of things have stuck with me from my visit to Ypres – the mournful buglers playing the Last Post at the Menin Gate as the sun set, for example. Writing this during Advent, I particularly remember visiting a desolate field, marked by a simple cross, where the Christmas Truce took place. Apart from a lady who rode by on her horse, we were the only people there. I stood looking down into the valley and wondered what a soldier of 1914 would have thought, standing in the same place . . . and I began to picture what happened.
On 24 December soldiers from both sides ceased fighting, came together and played a game of football. The next day they were killing each other. One man might have found himself killing another whose hand he had shaken the day before. My perhaps childish mind prompted me to ask, ‘Why didn’t the soldiers simply say to their officers, “Sorry, we have made friends and just won’t fight, even if you threaten to shoot us”?’
Turn to here and here to read more about the Christmas Truce.
Winston Churchill wrote something similar in a letter home to his wife:
Leaders chivvying on the war could not afford to shoot all their men so, with hope, if they had all protested together then they would have survived. Or the winners of the war could have been decided by a football match.
My whirring mind stopped when I wondered what would have happened, after the Christmas Truce, if there had been women fighting instead of men. As my mind stopped, the war seemed to also. After making friends during a truce, a woman could never have continued to fight the next day. Why? On the whole, women are more prone to emotion than men, and are perhaps less proud and stubborn. So maybe war would have ended there for a woman.
For many soldiers fighting in the First World War, it made no difference which country won or lost. They died anyway. But what happened during the Christmas Truce made a difference. The bond between soldiers who had no idea how to communicate in each other’s language yet could still shake hands and smile – this would be remembered. This would still matter after they were ‘gone’.
MAGGIE FERGUSSON – Biographer and writer
In this centenary year, we’ll all be reflecting on the horrors of the First World War; the tragedy of lives cut short and the heroism of those who died – and rightly so. But we should remember too the soldiers who did not die, who carried home from the Flanders mud memories of carnage and misery, and then had to try to make sense of the future.
Like so many who went off to fight, my grandfather had grown up in what now seems a kind of rural idyll. He spent his boyhood in Claughton, a tiny Lancashire village between the Calder and the Brock valleys, the youngest of eight children – four boys, four girls. An album of old photographs evokes an apparently endless, carefree Edwardian summer. Men with turned-up trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves carry cricket bats and tennis rackets. Women in ankle-length skirts and pin-tucked blouses laugh from the shade of parasols. A farmer cuts a field of hay with a horse-drawn scythe.
Then we reach the summer of 1918. My grandfather, now nineteen, stands outside the family home, a young soldier, about to be commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. He looks straight at the camera, eager and smiling.
So the next photograph comes as a shock. He is back in England, lying in an iron-framed bed, wounded. Again, he looks straight at the camera, but now his expression is far away, haunted and desperately sad.
A part of the story that unfolded between these two photographs is told in the diary my grandfather kept when he went to war. On Tuesday 16 July 1918 he sails across the English Channel and his mood is high-spirited, almost romantic:
He reads The Jungle Book to send him to sleep.
For a time, his new life in France does not at all conform to the image most of us have of the First World War. Instead of mud and trenches, he describes games of polo, champagne and excellent food – including chickens sent out to him from Claughton. Time hangs heavy. He longs to go ‘up the line’ – ‘anything is better than waiting’. On a hot afternoon in August, he dreams of home:
Then, as he moves closer to the front, things take a grimmer turn. He is gassed. He finds body parts by the sides of the road. He watches a German soldier dying in a prisoner-of-war ‘cage’:
A number of his own friends also die.
The last diary entry is written on Saturday 14 September. My grandfather feels ‘bored’ and ‘restless’. ‘Something is going to happen,’ he writes. ‘Tomorrow we go up the line.’ He feels ‘mortally afraid’. Shortly afterwards, leading his men ‘over the top’, and turning to urge them all to keep their heads down, he was hit by a hand grenade. A jagged lump of metal penetrated his cheekbone just below his left eye, passed through the narrow space between the bottom of his brain and the roof of his mouth, and broke his right jaw. He would later describe with affection and gratitude the gentle kindness of the German prisoner of war who carried him to safety on a stretcher – ‘fatherly’ was the word he used of him. He was not expected to live.
What my grandfather’s diary never mentions is that three years earlier, in 1915, his eldest brother, Tom, had died, aged twenty-seven, of wounds received at the battle of Neuve Chapelle. The following year, his uncle Henry died in Devil’s Wood on the Somme. So by the time my grandfather was wounded, his mother had already lost a son and a brother – not to mention four of her five nephews: Theodore, killed at Illies in October 1914, aged twenty-six; John, killed at Pilkin, Flanders, in April 1915, aged twenty-five; Hugh, killed on the Somme in July 1916, aged nineteen; and Francis, killed on the Vimy Ridge in April 1917, aged twenty-one. My great-grandmother was a brilliant, gifted woman, with a depressive streak. When the news reached Claughton that my grandfather had been wounded, probably fatally, she took her
own life.
In almost every village in England, the names of those who died for their country in the Great War are engraved on plinths and obelisks and memorial stones. But who knows how many died of grief?
There was more tragedy to come. In the summer of 1919, another of my grandfather’s brothers, Roger, serving with the Expeditionary Force in Russia, was blown up defusing a mine that was floating towards a hospital barge on the River Dvina.
The doctors never managed to remove the metal from my grandfather’s head. It lodged there for the next seventy-odd years, along with a deep crevice where it had entered his face. From time to time he was afflicted with moods of great darkness, when the world seemed bleak. He was easily moved to tears – ‘the gift of tears’, he called it. The wound and the tears gave him an air of dignity and quiet authority.
He was a man of deep faith. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, looking back over his war diaries in old age, wondering why he had been spared, ‘there was something the good Lord wanted me to do with my life.’ He had a long and happy marriage, was father to seven children, and was successful in his career. Yet, despite the demands of family and work, he devoted himself unceasingly to helping others – ‘always’, as the priest said at his requiem mass, ‘wanting to help them forwards to fuller life and growth.’ He supported orphaned and abandoned children, young offenders from deprived homes, and disabled ex-servicemen. In the summer, he accompanied sick and handicapped people on pilgrimages to Lourdes. ‘He was,’ as a friend wrote after his death, ‘one of the goodest men I’ve ever known.’
‘True heroism,’ the poet George Mackay Brown believed, ‘is to try to live this one day well, whatever the circumstances.’ If that is so, then my grandfather was as much a hero as his brothers who died in the war.
CAROL HUGHES – Nurse, and wife of the late Ted Hughes
In this poem, Ted describes his father’s near-death experiences during the First World War, his post-war decoration for heroism at Ypres, the DCM – and the nightmares he endured for many years beyond the war’s end.
Ted wrote the poem after William Hughes’s death in 1981. It evokes his spirit with deep humility and filial love, yet the writer yearns to comprehend his own inability to question the father during his lifetime about the horrors and hopelessness of warfare suffered by him and countless others.
FOR THE DURATION
I felt a strange fear when the war-talk,
Like a creeping barrage, approached you.
Jig and jag I’d fitted much of it together.
Our treasure, your D.C.M. – again and again
Carrying the wounded
Collapsing with exhaustion. And as you collapsed
A shell-burst
Just in front of you lifting you upright
For the last somnambulist yards
Before you fell under your load into the trench.
The shell, some other time, that buried itself
Between your feet as you walked
And thoughtfully failed to go off.
The shrapnel hole, over your heart – how it spun you.
The blue scar of the bullet at your ankle
From a traversing machine-gun that tripped you
As you cleared the parapet. Meanwhile
The horrors were doled out, everybody
Had his appalling tale.
But what alarmed me most
Was your silence. Your refusal to tell.
I had to hear from others
What you survived and what you did.
Maybe you didn’t want to frighten me.
Now it’s too late.
Now I’d ask you shamelessly.
But then I felt ashamed.
What was my shame? Why couldn’t I have borne
To hear you telling what you underwent?
Why was your war so much more unbearable
Than anybody else’s? As if nobody else
Knew how to remember. After some uncle’s
Virtuoso tale of survival
That made me marvel and laugh –
I looked at your face, your cigarette
Like a dial-finger. And my mind
Stopped with numbness.
Your day-silence was the coma
Out of which your night-dreams rose shouting.
I could hear you from my bedroom –
The whole hopelessness still going on,
No man’s land still crying and burning
Inside our house, and you climbing again
Out of the trench, and wading back to the glare
As if you might still not manage to reach us
And carry us to safety.
Ted Hughes
Observed by his two sons William Hughes, a survivor of Gallipoli (1915), walks gingerly across a frosty courtyard. He is elderly now, frail-boned and cautious in his footwork. The sons laugh a little, not knowing why, but perhaps nervously in that embarrassed way we all do sometimes.
With hindsight, the writer reflects on this in the poem, and on the engines of war, the brave hopes and patriotism of those sucked in – and ultimately the senselessness of it all. War – that consumes the life-force even of those who survive.
THE LAST OF THE 1ST/5TH LANCASHIRE FUSILIERS
A Souvenir of the Gallipoli Landings
The father capers across the yard cobbles
Look, like a bird, a water-bird, an ibis going over pebbles
We laughed like warships fluttering bunting.
Heavy-duty design, deep-seated in ocean-water
The warships flutter bunting.
A fiesta day for the warships
Where war is only an idea, as drowning is only an idea
In the folding of a wave, in the mourning
Funeral procession, the broadening wake
That follows a ship under power.
War is an idea in the muzzled calibre of the big guns.
In the grey, wolvish outline.
War is a kind of careless health, like the heartbeat
In the easy bodies of sailors, feeling the big engines
Idling between emergencies.
It is what has left the father
Who has become a bird.
Once he held war in his strong pint mugful of tea
And drank at it, heavily sugared.
It was all for him
Under the parapet, under the periscope, the look-out
Under Achi Baba and the fifty billion flies.
Now he has become a long-billed, spider-kneed bird
Bow-backed, finding his footing, over the frosty cobbles
A wader, picking curiosities from the shallows.
His sons don’t know why they laughed, watching him through the window
Remembering it, remembering their laughter
They only want to weep
As after the huge wars
Senseless huge wars
Huge senseless weeping.
CATHERINE JOHNSON – Writer and screenwriter
We have no claim to the stars
Nid oes gennym hawl ar y sêr
Hedd Wyn (Blessed Peace) was the pen name of Ellis Humphrey Evans, a shepherd and poet from North Wales who died at the Battle of Passchendaele on 31 July 1917, aged thirty. Only a few weeks later his final poem, ‘Yr Arwr’ (The Hero), was awarded the highest accolade in Welsh literature, the Bardic Chair at the National Eisteddfod, the Welsh language festival of poetry and arts which is held every year.
Hedd Wyn had won many prizes for his poetry before the war, and as farming was a protected profession he stayed at home until the spring of 1917, when his family were called to send one of their sons to fight. Hedd Wyn joined up to protect his younger brother, Robert. He spent only four short months as a soldier and died on the Pilckem Ridge when a nose-cap shell hit him in the stomach and he was mortally wounded; 31,000 other Allied soldiers died on that day.
When the prize is announced at the National Eisteddfod, the name of the winning poet is called three t
imes. That year, 1917, it was held in the first week of September, in the presence of then Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. But when the winner was read out, there was no answer; the hall fell silent. In honour of Hedd Wyn, the Chair was draped in black cloth and the ceremony continued around the empty seat, a festival of tears.
His poetry is as moving and affecting as any of the English war poets and he is well known in Wales, but as he wrote in his mother tongue and there are only a few translations, his work isn’t as well known as Owen’s or Sassoon’s. His war poetry includes ‘Rhyfel, Yr Arwr Nid a’n Dango’, and ‘Y Blotyn Du’.
Y BLOTYN DU
Nid oes gennym hawl ar y sêr,
Na’r lleuad hiraethus chwaith,
Na’r cwmwl o aur a ymylch
Yng nghanol y glesni maith.
Nid oes gennym hawl ar ddim byd
Ond ar yr hen ddaear wyw;
A honno syn anhrefn i gyd
Yng nghanol gogoniant Duw.
THE BLACK SPOT
We have no claim to the stars
Nor the sad-faced moon of night
Nor the golden cloud that immerses
Itself in celestial light.
We only have a right to exist
On earth in its vast devastation,
And it’s only man’s strife that destroys
The glory of God’s creation.
Hedd Wyn
(translation by Alan Lwyd)
FRANK GARDNER – Journalist
For me, there will always be something inexplicably sad and nostalgic about Vaughan Williams’s piece of music, The Lark Ascending.
Only Remembered Page 17
