Egremont - Some desperate glory : the First World War the poets knew

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For Simon Head

Contents

Preface

We know the war through their poetry. Siegfried Sassoons scathing satires; Wilfred Owens compassion; Edmund Blundens gentle but shocking lyricism; Julian Grenfells joy in battle; Rupert Brookes surge of patriotism; Isaac Rosenbergs mystical vision: all these have shaped how we see the western front. Then theres the tragic sacrifice: Brooke and Grenfell dead in their twenties, Charles Sorley killed when hardly out of his teens, Edward Thomas older but not yet three years into his time as a poet, Robert Nichols breaking down during the battle of Loos, Owen and Rosenberg victims of the wars last year. All this makes for a powerful myth in which a poets imagined life can be as moving as his poems.

The poets of the First World War have a memorial in Westminster Abbey, recognizing their place in Britains last century as a world power. But some historians believe that much of the best-known poetry of the war is defeatist, symbolizing loss of will, even decline that it misses the spirit that led to victory. The poets have been accused of contributing to a climate of appeasement that led to a second world war. Critics have said that their work is too dominated by its subject, leading to a kind of lyrical journalism.

What remains true is that they were made by the war and then made a lasting vision of it. Their lives reflect its emotion and its history; their work shows how it was, for them, to be there. They also show some of the hopes and disappointments of early twentieth-century Britain.

In this book, I have chosen eleven poets who fought. I have set their poems in the year that they were written. Rupert Brooke and Charles Sorley are there strongly at the start of the war; Sassoon enters after his first experience of the trenches at the end of 1915; Isaac Rosenbergs war also starts in late 1915; Edward Thomas writes from England, not reaching the front until some two and a half months before his death in 1917; Wilfred Owen isnt represented until the wars last two years; Ivor Gurney and Edmund Blunden have many poems in the Aftermath chapter, a reflection of how long their war lasted. Some poets feature less: Julian Grenfell because he wrote only one memorable war poem; Robert Nichols through his erratic quality, although I admire some of his work and wanted to include a poet thought of at the time as a new Byron.

I began writing about the first two decades of the twentieth century some forty years ago. The First World War featured in my books about the soldier and writer Sir Edward Spears and about the politician Arthur Balfour, and particularly in my biography of Siegfried Sassoon. In the 1980s and 1990s I wrote novels set in contemporary Britain, but the characters felt the two wars the First and the Second strongly in their lives, either in their own memories or in their countrys idea of itself. Having also written about Germany, I believe that for Britain especially for quite prosperous Britons (which many of the war poets were) there was something uniquely shocking in the reality of the First War. For almost a century, most British lives had been more sheltered from threat and conflict than their European counterparts, even if the nation was becoming less confident as the twentieth century began.

Britains recent wars were part of my childhood during the 1950s and 1960s. The First World War memorials at my schools and at Oxford astonished me with their quantity of names. I leafed through old bound copies of the wartime Illustrated London News that we had at home, awed by the many photographs of officers whod been killed (other ranks didnt feature) and drawings of artists ideas of the Somme or Ypres.

Both my grandfathers had fought: one in the Royal Navy, the other as a young officer in France and Belgium. To them it had been the Kaisers War; they didnt speak much about it, although the name showed whom they blamed. It was the poets who evoked the war most vividly for me when, as a schoolboy, I first read them. They gave dramatic and clear shape, and emotion, to the change from enthusiasm to pitiful weariness from Brooke to Sassoon and Owen: a reflection of how an adolescent might see the arc of life.

Later I learned that Brookes enthusiasm was fading as he sailed towards the Dardanelles, that Owens last letters to his mother from the front said that there was no place where he would rather be. Trying to fathom their feelings and experiences has become one of my obsessions as I searched for an intimate glimpse of what had been perhaps the most significant and far-reaching European event of the twentieth century.

The poets in this book range from the aristocratic Julian Grenfell to Isaac Rosenberg, the son of a poor Jewish pedlar, and Ivor Gurney, whose father was a tailor. Most of them were uneasy in the pre-war world. Many were formed by those powerful institutions, the late-Victorian public schools (or, more accurately, private schools). Some saw war as a rescue.

Those who survived couldnt leave the war. Robert Graves wrote a brilliant memoir of it, Goodbye to All That , and then left England, as if to shake off the past, disowning his war poems. Yet the trenches stayed in his dreams until he died in his eighties. Ivor Gurney and Edmund Blunden wrote some of their best war poems after 1918. Neither Robert Nichols nor Siegfried Sassoon again found poetry strong enough to match what theyd written about the western front.

Other poets wrote about the war Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Gibson, Laurence Binyon yet saw no fighting. Through these eleven, you can see the wars course through their writing and their lives. All were warriors.

PRELUDE

A T LEAST ONE POET had been looking forward to war. In the summer of 1913, Julian Grenfell was a twenty-five-year-old army officer returning to his regiment in South Africa after some months of home leave. Grenfell had the best that Edwardian Britain could offer. Hed joined the Royal Dragoons, a cavalry regiment, in 1910, after Balliol College, Oxford, where he had gone from Eton. He had glamour; clever, strong and handsome, he was a hard-playing sportsman. But there was also violence; he boxed ferociously, he chased a Jewish millionaire undergraduate round the quad with a stock whip and beat up a cab driver who overcharged him. The Balliol authorities, perhaps in awe of his aristocratic status, brushed off complaints from other students about his rowdiness.

Yet Julian Grenfell was no mindless hearty. His mother, Lady Desborough, was a renowned hostess; her children grew up with cabinet ministers, writers and generals. At Balliol, he read Greats, or classics and philosophy; he drew and wrote essays challenging the complacency of his parents world that of conventionally cultured Edwardian high society. Resentment of the power of this world, and its relentless pressure, drove him to have a nervous breakdown. Apparently trapped by his position and success within it, and its strong, predictable expectations, he thought of suicide. The violence, the loaded shotgun beside him during his convalescence in his parents country house, betrayed anger and despair. All this was before he became a soldier.