Sophie Whitehead presents the first of a three-part study of the ways in which contemporary writers portrayed the First World War and the misconceptions that people still hold about the war a hundred years later.
‘Spades represent the
dullness, mud, weariness and sordidness. Clubs stand for another side, the humour, the cheerfulness, the
jollity, and good-fellowship. In diamonds I see the glitter of excitement and
adventure. Hearts are a tragic suit of agony, horror and death. And to each man the invisible
dealer gives a succession of cards.’
Accompanied
with this changing tide of spirits, introductions of new railways, adaptations
in the ammunition and armoury used to fight and developments in metallurgy,
chemicals and electricity leading to new forms of explosives and propellants
for improved firearms and artillery altogether created a tumultuous environment
which people had not witnessed before. This changing environment created an
ideal place for young authors and poets to document and to arise; much as the
Romanticists such as Wordsworth had documented the changing effects of the
early Industrial Revolution, poets such as Sassoon and Owen were able to
capture the end. However the atmosphere in which soldiers were inflicted to
fight in had changed unwittingly. No one had ever fought with a modern pistol
or artillery weapon before and the days of hand to hand combat were dying out,
replaced instead with crueller, more sinister dead mate trench battle.
Foreword
My immediate interest into studying
the First World War, or the Great War, as it is more famously known, was
initially the abundance of misconceptions people still hold about it today. As
with any atrocity peoples’ lives will still invariably carry on,
however, a piece of the past always remains and becomes carried forward into
the future for people to learn from and reflect their lives to. The attraction
of studying such an event is that for me, although previous battles and wars
have invariably taken place, this war which consisted of over one hundred and
fifty individual battles would set the epitome of the death, destruction and
sacrifice for ones country that would follow in future years. Further, what
made the event so intensely compelling to research was the range of material
available to study, and the extent of information accessible. No generation
before has ever been able to learn so much about a war as today’s and it seemed
foolish to waste this opportunity. As with any great war there is always a shrouded
sense of mystery as to the precise events that took place. The reason for this?
Not a single person today was there. In fact in May 2010 the only living male
First World War combat veteran, British-born sailor Claude Choules, died in
Australia at the age of 110. Therefore we, as the public, can only rely on what
we read, watch or see publicised in the media today. No one witnessed the
slaughter and blood that was spilt with their own eyes so although one can
empathise with those that lived during the War, we can never truly know the
precise details of a war that operated and shaped people’s lives all around the
world on such a grand scale. The frank line is war is a horrendous prospect to
think about, no matter who you are or what you study, but the justification of
war differs between individuals. One could immediately associate it with death,
violence and blood shed yet another, might seek an idea of a hero complex in a
contrast of this with the large amount of courage, bravery and honour it took
for young men and women to sign up to fight for their country. People knew
little in 1914 about war, let alone a war that would path the way for future
battles to follow. This is where a keen interest into the study of the medias
involvement into the publication and propaganda begins to unfold. Before 1914
the general publics’ view of war was largely down to exactly what the media
wanted to convey and what it didn’t; largely the latter was the most shocking.
Today’s public is entitled far larger glimpses into the lives of soldiers than
those of 1914 ever were allowed before. Soldiers signed up for the First World
War for a magnitude of reasons; some to escape a closeted environment at home;
some to see the world; some even for the ‘joie de vivre’ but one thing remained
the same in almost all cases, these war ‘heroes’ knew little about the
atrocities of battle like the public today do. Even less about the emotional
and physical strain on the future of their lives once they returned home from
battle and the absence of knowledge their families had about the lives they had
lived overseas. It was this absence of knowledge both for the soldiers signing
up and the public back at home that led to the onset of an illness that to date
was one of the most cruel and toyed with syndromes; the onset of ‘shell shock.’
A problem relatively undiagnosed before the Great War this illness was played
with and abused by many doctors who, in the exact words of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by
Virginia Woolf (which explores the issue intently) would see ‘absolutely
nothing wrong’ with them. This study of literature and film as mediums for the
conveyance of information intertwined with the images portrayed by the media is
one of great interest to me and hence the reason why I chose to base this
extended project upon this title.
Within
this essay, I therefore seek to explore the key differences in how the
government portrayed the war to the general public; through use of monopolising
media and propaganda, with how those who fought in the war relayed their
experiences both at the front and at home, in order to try and obtain a clearer
picture of the harsh realities of the Great War itself. In order to do this I
shall be analysing what I believe to be key fragments of literature and poetry,
written both pre-war and post-war and comparing these to popular pieces of both
early film and propaganda from the government published at that time. Within
this exploration I will also ‘debunk’ myths that haunt us still concerning the
war so that by the end of the essay a modern day audience should obtain a
clearer image of both sides of the story; that from the governments and those
directly involved.
Introduction
‘In
these days I was very happy. This was Life, and if one was occasionally
frightened out of one’s wits, a sudden fright never did a young man any harm
[...]. To lie breathless in the German wire with a storming party of
volunteers, armed with clubs and made invisible in the darkness by having our
faces blacked was a splendid adventure […].'
(Carrington, A Subaltern’s War 26)
‘The
grossly mismanaged First World War, into which I plunged as soon as I left
school, gave us infantryman so convenient a measuring-stick for discomfort,
grief, pain, fear and horror, that nothing since has greatly daunted us. But it
also brought new meanings of courage, patience, loyalty and greatness of
spirit; incommunicable, we found, to later times.’ (Introduction, Graves 1)
‘He
closed his eyes and had a vision of men advancing under a rain of shells. They
had seemed so toy-like, so trivial and ineffective when opposed to that
overwhelming wrath, and yet they had moved mechanically as though they were
hypnotized or fascinated by some superior will [...]. It had seemed impossible
to relate that petty, commonplace, unheroic figure, in ill fitting khaki and a
helmet like the barber’s basin with which Don Quixote made shift on his
adventure, to the moral and spiritual conflict, almost superhuman in its agony,
within him.’ (Manning 10)
‘Battle
is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It
brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in
battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty.
Duty is the essence of manhood.’ (George S. Patton)
‘There
is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long
enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.’ (Ernest
Hemingway)[1]
In his war memoir, ‘Nothing
of Importance: A Record of Eight Months at the Front’ (1917), Bernard Adams
compares the experience of war to a deck of cards:
I
start my essay on this note because in many ways it is one of the fairest and
most justifiable attempts to explain a war which showed itself across so many
sides. In encapsulating the multifaceted nature of war, both the allure and the
terror, Adams perfectly reflects the breadth of responses we find in prose
narratives nowadays. From novels and short stories to memoirs and diary
entries, combatants and non-combatants alike sought to depict their personal
experience of war, so as not only to vent their own personal feelings in regard
to it but also to allow the public a glimpse.
[2]Prose, taken
namely in the form of novels and memoirs, can often be converted as a vehicle
for sustained reflection on an event long after it has taken place. A clear
example of this is ‘Birdsong’ by Sebastian Faulks (1999) which attempts to
portray the harrowing lives of soldiers in WW1, split across a timespan of
three generations. This attempt to subvert the past with the future highlights
the importance of learning from past mistakes in order to continue the wiser
into the future.
For
reasons of reliability men were able to document and tell the story directly
from the front line which also acted as a way to vent the inescapable reality
of the torment these soldiers had to face on a day to day basis. Because of
this many accounts of the First World War come from directly during the
conflict. For example many of the poems of Siegfried Sassoon were inspired from
his days in the trenches, alongside his mentor and friend, Wilfred Owen; as
explored in Pat Barkers ‘Regeneration’ trilogy. Siegfried Sassoon had been back
in England for almost three months, recovering from a severe bullet wound, when
he wrote this prognosticatory letter to his commanding officer, on 6 July 1917:
‘I am making this
statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war
is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it… I believe that the war upon which I entered as
a war of defence and liberation has now become a
war of aggression and conquest…I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops…I am not
protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the
fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I
make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them.’
However
although Sassoon understood the war to be perceived wrongly
by the general public, he was unmistakably wrong himself on one point. This was
that he was not ‘fully aware’ of how exactly the authorities would react and
how heavily they actually took accusations that criticised the war. Indeed, earlier
in the war, the war officials had handed out often brutal treatment to
deserters and conscientious objectors, knowing that public opinion was wildly
supportive of war and this was not to be tainted. Deserters were often given
the harshest of punishments; a court martial was common for those that even
neglected a duty after days on wake. However, as is common with most wars the
conflict that was originally meant to be supposedly ‘over by Christmas’ (although
there is a large amount of doubt over this exact phrase being used less as a
supposable time frame and more as a morale ‘booster’ to encourage those who
could to join the war effort) was not and this caused an influx of people,
including officers serving at the front, who privately empathised with what
Sassoon was saying (even if they thought he was ‘mad’
to say it) to oppose the war effort. The problem was that the war office had
never had to deal with such an open disproval made publicly and from such a
distinguished figure as Sassoon who was the perfect conscientious objector. Not
only was he becoming renowned as one of the country’s finest young poets, he
was also a war hero. It is Sassoon who also helped make the syndrome ‘shell
shock’ more commonly known, as previously it had been largely a misdealt with,
or certainly in a large number of cases, misunderstood disease. He was
prescribed treatment at a convalescent home at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh
where he would meet his poetic admirer Wilfred Owen. Upon meeting Sassoon
remarked ‘It amused me [Sassoon] to remember…that I wondered whether his poems
were any good!’ They were. Their encounter is the centrepiece of Pat Barker’s war trilogy, Regeneration.
Many
sides to war have been explored since then and indeed whilst some chose to
focus on the bravery and honour, others sought solace in unearthing the harsh
realities of war itself. Indeed the French author Henri Barbusse in his
translated novel ‘Le Feu' (Under Fire),
published in French in 1916, provided a vehement denunciation of militarism,
seeking to side with Sassoon's unshaken belief in the misconduct of war. Known
for his brutal realism, Barbusse monopolised stark, graphic language to present
the appalling horror of mechanical warfare. In this account, soldiers are not ‘adventurers
or warriors’ but rather ‘civilians uprooted’, who ‘await the signal for death
or murder.’ Barbusse speaks of ‘men of culture and intelligence’ being forced
into a war where a topsyturvyedom accompanies every route. “‘Germany must win’ says
the Englishmen. Austria’s act is a crime,’ says Austria.” Barbusse speaks of
war as a place ‘detached from the world itself, whose faculties are deepened by
suffering and mediation as far remote from their fellow man as if they were
already of the future.’
Other
mediums of information have been film, both in the commercial sense such as the
coloured images we see today but also war propaganda and VCR regarding the
publication of individual governmental missions, such as Arthur Hurst's famous ‘War
Neuroses’ clip which featured shell shock victims miraculously cured by various
treatments over a short period of time. In truth the government would only show
what they felt would be helpful for them to broadcast to encourage morale both
within the troops but also what would stir patriotism back at home. A war could
only be fought if England and Britons would support it from the home front and
this unescapable force of patriotism was a strength to be reckoned with
throughout the period of 1914 to 1918.
Debunking
the Myths of World War One
World
War One: The First Total War
Amongst any major event rumours will
always fly. Indeed when faced with such a large spectacle to document it can be
very hard to decipher and decode every rumour that can arise out of a situation
such as that of the Great War. No war in history attracts more controversy
and myth than World War One because it is seen to be set apart from previous
wars in so many ways. For one it is seen as the worlds first war since the
Industrial Revolution and marked the end in many ways of the Romantic poets
once and for all as well as the era of enlightenment. To understand why the war
itself was so notable, one must understand the raw definition of a ‘Total War.’
This is a war which combines all aspects of living and affects all people.
Everybody was affected by some form of debris from this conflict; whether it be
the families who were stranded without sons back at home or the soldiers who
had to witness the bloodshed and the monotony of trench life day by day abroad,
in Verdun or the Somme for example. However it is important that we don't
stereotype WW1 as the ‘worst’ war to be fought or the ‘most’ dangerous because
for some it was not. For the soldiers
who fought, it was in some ways better than previous conflicts, and in some
ways worse. It simply depended on where you were at any given moment.
Unfortunately by overtly distinguishing and thereby setting one war apart from another as ‘the most’ awful we are
blinding ourselves to the reality of not just WW1 but war in general. The
reason for this is that it is very important that we, as the future generation,
use the knowledge that we are now entitled to, to create a broad picture of a
war that ruined so many peoples lives and yet helped many others. To have too
narrower mind on any event runs one into the danger of belittling the
experience of soldiers and civilians caught up in countless other appalling
conflicts throughout history and the present day.
Of
course, saying this, it is important to appreciate that this war was unlike
others experienced up until 1914. The Industrial Revolution had seen the
introduction of railways which immediately sped up transportation and meant
that soldiers could move from one country to the next far more easily than had
been seen before. The use of trains as vehicles for transportation was heavily
monopolised by the war effort which saw both soldiers being sent from England
overseas and back again as well as the movement of ammunition and heavy
industry.
This
was the first mass global war of the industrialised age, a demonstration of the
prodigious strength, resilience and killing power of modern states. The war
also coincided incidentally with a high sprout of patriotism which had amounted
during the 19th century with a fear of a changing world and an attempt to cling
to the old norm. These beliefs which many held sacred when they entered war
would be the exact beliefs in which the war would help destroy in a blurring
between civilian and soldier. This had begun more than a century before with
the French Revolution of 1789 which had seen the first attempts to harness
citizenship and patriotism to a national war effort. In the ideology of
revolutionary France, young men were conscripted into the armed forces as part
of their duty as citizens, but the remaining population was also expected to
make personal sacrifices for the war. Known at first as 'People's War', this
idea developed in the 19th century as part of a growing sense of national
identity. By the middle of World War One it was known as 'Total War' - the
organisation of entire societies for war in a social, economic, and even
spiritual sense. There were, of course, protests and debates, but the vast
majority of people fought in World War One, or supported it with the 'Home
Front' because they believed that victory for their own country was worth the
cost.[3]
‘Over
by Christmas’
It was clear that a war which had on
hand so many ways to manoeuvre between countries and such skilled artillery
would certainly be no ordinary war. Some feared that the stakes for a war
had got too high and that there was simply too much to lose by too higher
powers; countries could be bankrupt or worst defeated at a terrifying cost not
only economically and geographically but socially as well. Many argued that
this would make a war on such a large scale impossible. Due to this military
plans were based not on being properly equipped for a stalemated and
attritional war of trenches, for the excellent reason that this was not the
kind of war that any country wanted to fight but rather instead, each placed
its hopes in winning a quick victory by rapid manoeuvres, to end the war and
have it ‘over by Christmas.’
Barbara Tuchman highlights in her book ‘Guns of
August’ that the Kaiser of Germany instructed his troops that they would be
home ‘before the leaves fall’ because the Schlieffen Plan predicated the defeat
of France within six weeks. With France defeated, the force of an united German
and Austro-Hungarian arms would be facing Russia, who would then be persuaded
to accept a negotiated peace. However the reality was somewhat different. The
Schlieffen Plan failed and the war was not over by Christmas, rather it would
last another four years. The air of optimism that surrounded the Great war at
the beginning meant neither side was prepared for a cruel and gruelling battle
that they would enface nonetheless.
Papers
monopolised the statement ‘over by Christmas’ in the early months of 1914 to
try and maintain a high level of patriotism amongst both the people at home and
the troops that would be sent overseas. After all, a troop which believed in
the reasons of its fighting would be likely to want to continue on fighting for
longer - the days of conscription had not yet been introduced and would not be
for another year. The media carefully broadcasted exactly what it wanted to
appear in the papers in accordance to exactly what the people at home would
want to hear. The true harrowing images of a war-stricken soldier dying in a
trench at Verdun would not inspire people to want to fight, nor would it fill
Britain with a sense of ‘Queen and Country’ so this was carefully removed from
appearing on any media portrayal of the war.
Nowadays
it is common to see the phrase ‘Over by Christmas’ as one coined to being what
would follow as an early, delusional tag line of WW1. It is often used as a
classic example of the media more or less ‘lying’ to the public back at home,
who would be none the wiser of the actual war that would take place over seas.
After all, there is reason to believe Kitchener believed that the war would be
a long one, and Charteris tells us that Haig believed the same; seen clearly
from Charteris, Field-Marshall Earl Haig (page 110): ‘At the Council of War on
August 5th 1914, [Haig] had pointed out that since Great Britain and Germany
were fighting for their existence the war would inevitably be a prolonged
struggle, and would require the development of the full force of the British
Empire to achieve success.’ Lloyd George, in a speech on 19th September 1914
reinforced this message when he stated that, ‘They think we cannot beat them.
It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in
the end we shall march through terror to triumph. We shall need all our
qualities, every quality that Britain and its people possess. Prudence in
council, daring in action, tenacity in purpose, courage in defeat, moderation
in victory, in all things faith, and we shall win.’
True
realities of the war were far more common in the ‘outrageous’ images of those
actually on the front line who would describe their often life shattering
experiences as they sought to ‘tell all’ in their novels and poems. Poets such
as Siegfried Sassoon who would witness the action on the Western Front himself,
used the inspiration from the war behind many of his later works. Pat Barker,
the author of Regeneration explains how it was the meeting of Sassoon from
young and doting Owen that inspired not simply an aspiring friendship for the
rest of their lives but also some of the best war poetry the world has ever
known.
Thomas
Hardy (1840-1928) himself, wrote on the opening days of WW1 and sets out to
reveal the feelings of cheerful, upbeat soldiers enlisting in a war which was
supposed to be ‘over by Christmas.’ This is seen most notably in his poem ‘Men
who march away.’
In our hearts of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.
Hardy’s
detachment in his work shows moreover through a lexical field of quaint and
unrealistic war language, which to a modern audience today would seem rather
strange and even then would not have reflected a true authentic voice of an
army. Hardy’s works straddled across the pendulum between the 19th and 20th
centuries and seems to do the same in its opinions about war. Hardy does not
seem to portray war as a glamorous event, but rather views it with a wary sense
of detachment. His poem ‘In Time of ‘The Breaking of the Nations’’’ (1915) goes
as far as to foretell the monotony and triviality of war compared to the
rivalrous occasions of day to day life; an irony which is very rarely induced -
in fact if anything it is usually the other way round.
Yonder a maid and her wight,
come whispering by:
Wars annuals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
Hardy
induces an immediate time phrase with his use of archaic diction to provide an
old fashioned feel upon the poem; to in some way set it apart from his life and
to increase the detachment between himself and the war happening elsewhere.
Blood
and the Boer War
The Boer War would mark the end of a
century, the war which would bring Britain into the next stage of modern
discovery. It was the longest, the bloodiest and the most expensive war
fought by the British army before World War One. While most critical studies
have resorted to the First World War as the main agent of radical change in
British consciousness, the power of the Boer War to shape popular imagination
and counter inherited stereotypes has been somewhat neglected. First-hand
accounts are centred on battles and generals, rarely evaluating the complexity
of a war that not only embodied tragedy, heroism and military and political
inefficiency on a large scale, but marked the end of an era. Beginning in 1899
and finishing in 1902, the Boer War connected two centuries. This position in
time makes it highly symbolic for being both traditional and modern in terms of
both military strategies and its impact on literature and the arts.
The
Boer war perhaps provided the beginning sign that the world was changing and an
industrial revolution was definitely on the horizon and with it would accompany
crucial alterations, most notably seen in the class system, which will be covered
further on. The previously-undefeated
British empire was beginning to weaken and moreover, seeing how strongly the
Boer’s were prepared to fight for independence from the ruling Britons - and
more, how strongly and harshly the British were prepared to crush rebellion led
many to see the behaviour inflicted on the Boer’s as unjustified and cruel. The
Boer War produced one of the earliest signs of anti-imperialism from the
colonial people. Across the rest of the world as well, Britain’s
empire was seen in a new way and its morality as a world power was questioned.
Until the war, Britain had shown little trouble defeating any colonial
uprisings but the war began to show that they were not as strong as they had
appeared – the amount of men, resources and effort that had to be put into the
war showed Britain’s weaknesses and suggested that it might
one day be possible to defeat them. This backdrop provided a perfect start to
what would be a new classification, and a new generation of warfare; one that
even the ‘almighty’ Britain would be unable to fight singlehandedly. In many
ways the Boer war was described as a mere ‘dress-rehearsal’ for World War One
which would happen just over ten years later. It marked a changing of attitudes
and with improved technology and medical equipment, the world was ready for a
change.
Often
when studying a period of history, Literary scholars like to label the time
according to who lived or who ruled and what major successes each time period
experienced; the Victorian era for example with the introduction of modern
technology for the first time. Such follows that writers and poets can be fit
into these time periods and act as an embodiment of the time they exist in.
Lord Alfred Tennyson, for example, can be clearly seen to link best with the
Victorian period of rule. His famous poem ‘Charge of the light brigade,’ about
a tragic incident which occurred in the Crimean war (1854) seems to epitomise
Victorian values, especially that of ‘Queen and Country.’ It promotes feelings
of patriotism and of fighting for a clear cause; an old fashioned value that
the government always knew what it was doing and the plan it had set across.
Although this spirit of battle was slowly dying out, the same sort of anguish
is mirrored in a poem by what was probably the best example of a woman
exhorting young men to fight by the use of emotive actions and cowardice if
they didn’t in World War One. Jesse Pope’s reputation, made famous by ’The Call’
was so far proceeded that Wilfred Owen originally wrote his infamous poem, ‘Dulce
et decorum est’ ‘to Jesse Pope.’
Who’s for the trench?
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French?
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to
begin?
Who’s going out to win?
Who’s keen on getting
fit?
Who means to show his grit?
Who’ll earn the empire
thanks?
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the
victors ranks?
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banner and rolling drums…
Pope
enforces the use of a jingoistic, patriotic narrative undertone throughout the
piece, very similar to that of Tennyson’s view of war. Her attitude in fact
appears dated, enlightened with chivalric undertones and a basic view of
heroism; one which in the end simply portrayed a naivety and ignorance and a
blatant unrealistic view of what fighting an actual war was like. Her false
allegations of war and a stereotypical image of ‘rolling drums’ and a ‘procession
[that] comes’ can be explored to show a lack of actual knowledge of the general
public at the time on what the conditions of war were like, and hence further
show perhaps a gullible ignorance the media and propaganda at the time would
show of a war they wanted to only reveal part of.
As
Siegfried Sassoon comments however, by the middle of the First World War,
ideologies changed and ‘the war upon which I [Siegfried] entered as a war of
defence and liberation [had] now become a war of aggression and conquest.’ He
rejects the idea that Pope enforced, that ‘chivalry redeems the wars disgrace (‘The
Glory of Women’) and enforces instead the idea that the glamour surrounding
chivalry found in previous wars, was not to be found in the Great War. Such
works by Pope inspired many to write against her who criticised the irony in
her writing; she condemned those who wouldn't fight - but then did not fight
herself. It was this view that Helen Hamilton stressed greatly in her poem ‘The
Jingo Woman:’
Oh! Exasperating woman,
I’d like to wring
your neck,
I really would:
You make all women seem like such
duffers.
Can’t you see it isn’t
decent,
To flout and goad men into doing,
What is not asked of you?
Soldiers
signed up only to be met with horrifying conditions in trench warfare; not at
all the perfect ideal they had envisaged when signing up to fight.
As
Tennyson writes:
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of death,
Rode the six thousand.
Although
the general lyric may hold true to the war poetry the modern audience can see
today, there is a general tone to the poem that slowly changed. People no
longer felt comfortable talking about the Great War in such an epic attempt of
heroism (as witnessed in Tennyson’s work: ‘Honour the light brigade! Oh, the
wild charge they made!) perhaps due to the fact that the war seemed to be never
ending compared to its ‘over by Christmas’ origins; or perhaps people felt like
war strategy itself had changed and with this brought a more depressive tone to
the pieces written, especially those by Sassoon and Owen.
A
graduation of morale changed throughout the poetry; cheerful and flamboyant in
the Victorian era and slowly seeing a change at the start of the century with
the Boer War. As Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitai Lampada’ writes on images from the Boer
war, although the sentiment remains the same as those seen by Tennyson, for
example, there is a slow integration of the harsh reality of life itself.
The sand of the desert is sodden red
-
Red with the wreck of a square that
broke -
The Gatlings jammed and the Colonel
dead -
And the regiment blind with dust and
smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its
banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a
name,
But the voice of a school boy
rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! Play up!
And play the game!’
Newbolt
sets the beginning of the actuality of war poetry that would follow. Multitudes
of images of ‘regiment[s] blind’ and ‘river[s] of death’ can be seen as almost
a literary foreshadowing of the horrors of the Battle of the Somme which saw
millions plummet ‘over the top’ blinded by mustard gas and ‘dust and smoke’ to
face a possibly tragic end. Newbolt also draws to attention the infancy of many
actually in charge of the troops, and this is true. Many of the leading
officers were in fact the younger members of the battalion; some just left
school affected by patriotic fervour at the outbreak of war. Either way,
whether this ‘school boy’ be in terms of age or even just a childlike fear of
being confronted by an unknown enemy, soldiers resorted back to their youth
like ways; often calling out to their mothers in their last breaths for safety.
However the clear point is that this poetry was not uncommon, and the Boer war
provided this mere shift in view. It did not seem strange to those who read it
then, or even throughout WW1 and for years afterwards. The Victorian public
held high a vision of service to ones country and to ones throne; a statute of
sacrifice and an undying sense of loyalty - features themselves which could be
used to explain and justify a war with just so many dead.
Although
it is important to note that neither Newbolt, nor Tennyson (as mentioned
earlier) actually fought in the Great War it would be their poetry that was
read by the generation of young men destined to be either the survivors or
casualties of the Western Front.
[1] War, although
a unified experience, can be very unique for each person that is part of it.
These quotes help to portray the ways in which war is interpreted by each
individual to provide a well rounded viewpoint of the First World War.
[2] Picture: The
true spirit of comradeship as a soldier offers a helping hand to another as he
carries a wounded comrade across a trench at the Battle of Ginchy
(Image from http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jul/27/first-world-war-state-press-reporting -
taken by Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images)
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