Some Desperate Glory (14 page)

He saw Robert Graves, back in France since June, and they talked about what they would do after the war – poetry and travel. That the men loved him was Sassoon's consolation; he longed for books and music, not, however, for a return to his pre-war world of cricket, hunting and sexual frustration. The battle went on, raging round certain vantage points like the notorious High Wood, where Graves's battalion was ordered to be in reserve for an attack on 20 July. Relentless German shelling caused Graves to be very badly wounded. Taken to a dressing station, and lying unconscious for twenty-four hours, he was given up for dead and put on the regimental casualty list – which Sassoon saw with horror, writing desperately to Marsh, ‘Won't they leave us anyone we are fond of?' In fact Graves survived, and was taken across the Channel to hospital in north London. By August both the poets were in England: Sassoon with fever and dysentery, Graves with wounds in the chest, thigh, shoulder and above one eye.

What happened at High Wood is typical of the heavy cost of the Somme for little obvious gain. It was captured in July, after bad casualties; then the Germans counter-attacked and weren't evicted until 15 September, after two months of battle.

Edmund Blunden was left out of a diversionary attack made by part of his regiment on 30 June, south-west of Neuve Chapelle. His battalion moved up to Cambrin, where there was shrapnel, shelling and exploding mines. On 20 July they went back to trenches near Neuve Chapelle recently occupied by Ivor Gurney, still under bombardment and making dangerous night patrols. By August they were at Cuinchy, in trenches near the brickstacks.

The names of the trenches amused Blunden (as they had Gurney): not taken from public schools this time but still an attempt to bring England to northern France: Windy Corner, Orchard Road, Queen's Road, Hatfield Road, one called Ducks' Bill because of its shape. His colonel revealed that he was a literary man who'd read a good review in the
Times Literary Supplement
of Blunden's first book of poems.

Reinforcements were needed to the south on 11 August, in the worst part of the Somme battle. To many of the men it seemed ‘death-news', as in Blunden's later poem ‘Two Voices', and he sought calm again in the summer landscape, reminded of his happy earlier life. He had his worst-yet war experience near Beaumont Hamel, as field-works officer leading bomb-carrying parties. Known as ‘rabbit' because of his fast pace, alertness and small size, he brought up his bombs in the confusion of battle and saw men break in bursts of terror. Edmund Blunden won the Military Cross for his courage at this time.

His battalion came under shellfire, even after withdrawing into billets. It was back in the front line by 16 September, quiet until an attack on Thiepval, captured by the British eleven days later. Blunden stayed at the front, with breaks of only a few days, through the last Somme offensive – five terrible November days of fighting, through drizzling rain and a barrage when ‘never had shells seemed so torrentially swift, so murderous'. Blunden got lost, until a crucifix loomed between Thiepval and Grandcourt, and he raced with his runner, Private Johnson, through shellfire by the glittering River Ancre back to the British line where they were welcomed ‘as Lazarus was'. The battalion left the Somme two days later, moving to what was to be a place of even greater danger: the land round Ypres.

In England since July, first with fever in hospital and then at the regimental depot in the Liverpool suburb of Litherland or in London or at home in Kent, Siegfried Sassoon had news from his battalion about fighting round Delville Wood and High Wood and the many woundings and deaths. His poetry became more fierce – as in ‘They' or ‘Blighters' – influenced by Hardy's satires, often with a knock-out blow in the last lines, these javelin-like verses sharpened by guilt at not being in the trenches.

To describe pain, Sassoon still used lyricism, as in ‘The Death Bed'. On a visit to Cambridge, he met Professor Sorley, Charles Sorley's father, and shocked the musical scholar Dent – the friend from Sassoon's training days at Pembroke College in 1915 who'd scorned Brooke's emotional patriotism – with stories of rough army life. Like most soldiers, Sassoon had contempt for those on the Home Front, however terrible he found the war.

The Somme had been horrific, for the Germans and for the British. The waves of July had changed into a series of smaller attacks, with not much ground gained. The British had had 82,000 casualties by the end of August; but Haig went on, insisting that the enemy was about to collapse. In September the tactic of the creeping barrage and the introduction of tanks had disappointing results because of technical hitches and too wide-ranging artillery. Rain came in October and November, bringing back the mud. By the end in November the British had had some 450,000 casualties, the French 200,000 and the Germans 400,000.

The enemy had suffered, as the writer Ernst Jünger, a German officer, admitted. Edmund Blunden thought that he'd seen a British ‘feat of arms vying with any recorded', feeling pride and ‘exaltation' and the sense that he and the troops could now bear anything. Another young officer, Charles Carrington, not at all a reckless warrior, held that the men's spirits were much lower away from the sound of guns than in the front line. To Carrington ‘the Somme raised the morale of the British army' and, although not an outright victory, gave the British a sense of superiority, man to man.

Glorification of patriotic duty hadn't died with Rupert Brooke. In 1916, Lady Desborough completed her memorial to her two dead sons, Julian and Billy Grenfell. Entitled
Pages from a Family Journal 1888–1915
, the thick book was produced, appropriately enough, by the Eton College printers and written at the suggestion of one former Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, with an early copy sent to another, Arthur Balfour. Lady Desborough had planned fifty copies; but this was extended to 250, privately printed at a cost of what today would be about £20,000. Consisting principally of extracts from her sons' letters (Billy had been killed, leading a charge, a few months after Julian) with linking passages by her, it tells of two brilliant boys, wayward sometimes but bound tightly to their background. There was an understandable doctoring of material to show immense filial devotion. As Julian dies, he smiles at his mother in a sunlit hospital room, saying his mysterious last words ‘Phoebus Apollo'.

Balfour, a cool man, wrote admiringly, but not effusively, of the book. There was, however, admiration from many, including Kipling and John Buchan, although others, especially some of the boys' contemporaries, thought much had been missed out, notably the ambiguity and desperation which had tormented Julian Grenfell. To the pacifists, the book was a nightmare, Lytton Strachey thinking that the boys came across as brave savages who enjoyed killing and Lady Ottoline Morrell, an unconventional aristocrat, seeing contempt for the less fortunate and a sense that, for the Grenfells, joy was a right.

The book became a pattern for later memoirs of dead aristocratic sons – but never, after what had happened under the leadership of the old governing class, could this world be quite so admired again. More bitter poets like Sassoon, Owen and Rosenberg – not the exultant Grenfell – came to be seen as the true voices of the war.

In August 1916, Isaac Rosenberg was near Loos, out of the front line but within range of shells. He took the wounded to hospital in handcarts, telling Gordon Bottomley, ‘It's a toss up whether you're going to be the carried or the carrier.' Poetry came painfully and included the jingoistic ‘Pozières', which he submitted as the divisional Christmas card, but it was rejected.

Rosenberg was back in the line by the last half of August. He marched with his brigade to an area near Beaumont Hamel on 11 November, to cold and wet trenches. There was a break for training in December, then back to the Somme area, near Bray, into land devastated by shellfire, with mud and broken trenches and excreta left unburied by the French. The historian of Rosenberg's division wrote later, ‘Now began three months in the most Godforsaken and miserable area in France, bar, possibly, the salient of Ypres. The whole country-side was a churned-up, yeasty mass of mud, as a result of the vile weather and of the battle which even yet had not petered out. The weather was awful. Constant rain was varied by spells of intensely cold weather and some very heavy snowfalls. Mud and dirt were everywhere…'

Isaac Rosenberg would be taken out of the line early in 1917, probably after Marsh had written to the War Office about this ‘budding genius'. This meant that, aged twenty-six, he would go to a works battalion, mending roads, still under shellfire. The private soldier's war was one of drudgery. It was luck what officer you had, if he cared for your welfare (as Siegfried Sassoon did) and avoided dangerous adventures. Rosenberg in 1915 wrote that ‘we have pups for officers'.

There was brutality; a Coldstream Guards corporal who had been in the fighting since Mons in the first month of the war, told Ivor Gurney in May 1916 that you should never take prisoners for all Germans should be killed. Gurney had been in Laventie, away from the Somme. Here, though, he could be in trenches only a few yards away from the enemy, near enough for bombs to be thrown. No man's land was full of the stinking dead. The men brought him happiness. He liked watching the French children in the villages, the women's faces etched with character; and the country could look like the Stroud valley. Some June days in a dug-out with Welsh soldiers whom his battalion was relieving were ‘the happiest for years', with good talk; ‘war's damned interesting', Gurney thought, and this brought the post-war poem ‘First Time In'. He heard a cuckoo; ‘what could I think of but Framilode, Minsterworth, Cranham, and the old haunts of home?' A Welshman said that the ‘damned bird' had sung constantly during the bombardment.

Gurney endured mortar and shell attacks and saw the deaths of comrades but wrote again in June, ‘Floreat Gloucestriensis! It was a great time; full of fear of course, but not so bad as neurasthenia…' A rumour came that he'd been recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal (‘my dear lady,' he told Marion Scott, ‘I am pleased with myself'). There was exasperation, as when he exploded that ‘the Army is an awful life for an artist, even if he has such experiences as we had with the Welsh. Either it is slogging along uselessly with a pack or doing nothing but hang about after – or boredom and hell in the trenches. Very little between.' He thought, however, that ‘it is much better out here than in England…'

Gurney dreamed of finding a profitable line in Brooke- or Grenfell-like verses: ‘a delight of rolling country, of a lovely river, and trees, trees, trees. Après la guerre, it must be that I write piffle under the name of Rupert de Montvilliers Fortescue-Carruthers or some such name, to rake in the good gold in exceeding abundance, to see the earth and the glories thereof and develop a paunch…' He set five songs to music in the trenches: one by Masefield, others by his friend F. W. Harvey, by Raleigh, by Yeats, and then his own ‘Song' (‘Only the wanderer knows').

Marion Scott cherished the poems that he sent her; and in 1917 she and others persuaded Sidgwick and Jackson, Rupert Brooke's publisher, to take Gurney's first collection
Severn and Somme
. In this were ‘Requiem', written east of Laventie in November 1916; ‘Strange Service', a hymn to Gloucestershire, from the summer; and ‘Bach and the Sentry', about memories of a Bach prelude as fog lifted across no man's land.

In October 1916, Gurney's battalion marched through Albert, where a damaged statue of the Virgin and Child was poised precariously on the church's tower; by 22 November they were in the line, in mud and shelling so bad that he told Marion Scott, ‘We suffer pain out here, and for myself it sometimes comes that death would be preferable to such a life.' But he thought, ‘It is better to live a grey life in mud and danger, so long as one uses it – as I trust I am doing – as a means to an end…' Not until 30 December was Ivor Gurney safe, out of the line and training in biting cold.

That day Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen reached the base camp at Etaples. Owen's military career had strangely prospered, first at Hare Hall Camp in Essex, then at the officers' school at Romford and on a course in London, after which he'd been offered a commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Losses brought about by Loos and the relentless shelling on the western front had opened up the class structure of the military. At first he'd refused promotion, thinking that he hadn't enough experience, but he soon changed his mind, becoming an officer in the Manchester Regiment in June. A camp at Milford in Surrey and courses at Aldershot, Oswestry, Southport and Fleetwood followed. At intervals there'd been leave, at home in Shrewsbury or in London, where in March 1916 he took a room in the Poetry Bookshop and gave his poems to Harold Monro. After some anxious days, Monro responded, with criticism and praise. Wilfred Owen was at the Hotel Metropole in Folkestone in December, awaiting embarkation for France.

Owen could seem vulnerable. In February 1916, his younger brother Harold thought ‘how physically unsophisticated, almost helpless he seemed … I could feel only a desperate sort of protective urge towards him, not pity – he never engendered that – but a compelling wish that I might somehow help this hunched-up little figure sitting next to me…' But Owen coped well when pitched into military life, noting that class distinction in the army could be banished by only two things, ‘animal sports and mortal danger', and ‘neither religion, nor Love, nor Charity, nor Community of Interests, nor Socialism, nor Conviviality can do it at all…'.

Edward Thomas was still in England. The artist Paul Nash was with him at Hare Hall and remembered the ‘always humorous interesting and entirely loveable' poet, and Thomas wrote of the kindness that he found there, made even better by visits to a literary admirer, Edna Clark Hall, who lived near by. Others, however, recalled ‘the most depressed man they ever met', showing how fast his mood could change.