Some Desperate Glory (17 page)

Arras brought humiliation for Wilfred Owen. He returned to his company in March and, when with a working party, fell into a hole which brought mild concussion and a visit to a casualty clearing station at Gailly on the Somme canal where he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. Here Owen thought of his future; perhaps after the war he might live in a cottage in southern England with an orchard, or so he told his brother Colin, ‘and give my afternoons to the care of pigs. The hired labour would be very cheap, 2 boys could tend 50 pigs. And it would be the abruptest change' from the writing that would be ‘my morning's work'.

He came into the front line again near Saint Quentin on 3 April where there was still snow, and lay four days and four nights without relief in the open, kept going by brandy and the fear of death. On 14 April, Owen led his section in an attack on the German trenches under fire and shelling, later telling his brother Colin that ‘going over the top' was ‘about as exhilarating as going over a precipice', that he'd wished for a bugle and drum and had kept chanting ‘Keep the line straight! Not so fast on the left! Steady on the left' before the ‘tornado' of shells.

The imagery of the 1918 poems goes back to this, and to the horror of a few days later, indelibly marking the literature of war. Owen's battalion stayed in the line around Savy, lying again in holes where ‘for twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots nor sleep a deep sleep…'. A shell hit a bank, just two yards from his head, and he was blown into the air, ending up in a hole just big enough to shelter him, with the dead body of a comrade near by, covered with earth. There followed a collapse, then possible imputations of cowardice from his commanding officer who judged that Owen was no longer fit to lead men and ordered him back to the casualty clearing station. The diagnosis was ‘neurasthenia', or shell shock, although he assured his mother that he hadn't had a breakdown. A medical report stated that on 1 May he was found to be ‘shaky and tremulous and his conduct and manner were peculiar and his memory confused'. By the end of June Owen was in Craiglockhart, a hospital housed in a dark, converted Victorian hydro in Slateford, a suburb of Edinburgh.

There was no breakthrough. The Canadians took Vimy Ridge, at a high cost, but the French offensive on the Chemin des Dames became a massacre that led to outbreaks of mutiny. Stalemate returned to the western front. One good omen did come, unconnected to military strategy or brilliance. In April the United States entered the war, provoked by German unrestricted submarine warfare, the sinking of the passenger liner
Lusitania
by a U-boat and the Zimmermann telegram (from which Germany had seemed to be plotting with Mexico against the US). The vast American reserves of manpower and equipment would take time to reach Europe in great enough numbers. For the Central Powers – Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire – the chances of victory had become more doubtful, and needed to be seized quickly, but they were still there.

Isaac Rosenberg wrote often to Eddie Marsh, who did his best for this poet, believing him to be a flawed genius. The transfer to a works battalion had taken Rosenberg back from the line; then he moved again at the start of 1917, this time to a trench mortar battery, a small unit that may have been thought likely to be more sympathetic, particularly as it was commanded by a Jewish officer who'd been asked by the colonel (to whom Marsh had written) to take on this unusual soldier. His new commander – later recalling a ‘completely hopeless' soldier and a ‘miserable-looking fellow, normal above the waist but short in the legs' – made him an assistant cook and was even more unimpressed when Rosenberg showed him some odd verses that included ‘something to do with a rat': one of the greatest poems of the war, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches'.

Another transfer came, back to a works battalion, then to the Royal Engineers. The work on roads, bridges, wire and railways was hard but Rosenberg drafted two verse plays, like ‘Moses' on Old Testament themes – ‘Adam and Lilith' and ‘The Amulet', both abandoned. By now, though, he wanted to show the real war. ‘Louse Hunting', which Bottomley had encouraged him to write after getting a letter that described frenzied men trying to catch and burn the lice with candles, is like a dark scene from Goya or Daumier. ‘Returning We Hear the Larks' was written in the spring or early summer, a pastoral poem that jerks quickly out of romanticism. ‘Dead Men's Dump' in May has the earth coldly taking in the dead as their souls rise, a sign of nature's obliviousness to human destruction reminiscent of the pitiless world of Charles Sorley's ‘All the Hills and Vales Along'.

In June, the centre of the war moved north for the British army, back to Ypres. Although shells still reached him, Rosenberg finished what he thought of as his best poem, ‘Daughters of War', a depiction of mythical goddesses who lead the dead into Valhalla. He told Marsh that the poem's ending was meant to show ‘the severance of all human relationship and the fading away of human love'. ‘Daughters of War' reflects an ambiguity about the war, for the Amazonian goddesses are magnificent as well as implacable purveyors of destruction. Gordon Bottomley thought it a masterpiece. To Marsh, however, the poem was discordant and obscure, and, to its author's disappointment, he left it out of the third volume of
Georgian Poetry
which was published in November.

In September, during the battle of Passchendaele, Rosenberg went to London on leave. He found, as those away from the front often did, that home was an anti-climax, a disappointment, partly because no civilian could imagine war's ‘elemental' life. An East End revolutionary, Joseph Leftwich, wrote of seeing the poet at this time: of how Rosenberg, obviously much improved physically, seemed ‘more boisterously happy than I had known him before' and anxious to contradict rumours that he ‘hated the army' as ‘he liked the life and the boys, and he had to fight. He wasn't going to let these people go about spreading rumours that he was funking it.' Such views come into the poem ‘Soldier Twentieth Century', about an unbroken line between great captains like Napoleon and Caesar and the troops in the trenches.

In February 1917, Ivor Gurney, in reserve at Raincourt, saw an increase in shelling as the Germans let off surplus ammunition before moving back. He entered the abandoned land in March, where villages had been wrecked, crossroads mined and wells destroyed; and on 31 March his battalion attacked and took the village of Bihecourt.

A bullet went through Gurney's right arm just below the shoulder, giving bad pain for half an hour before fading, enough to be sent to hospital in Rouen, not the coveted ‘Blighty'. As the fighting got worse, he thought back to the country where he'd once walked with his friend and fellow poet, F. W. ‘Will' Harvey: ‘I cannot keep out of mind what April has meant to me in past years – Minsterworth, Framilode, and his companionship.' He needed these, ‘for Beauty's sake; and the hope of joy'. In hospital, he dreamed of the Cotswolds and ‘a garden to dig in, and music and books in a house of one's own, set in a little valley from whose ridges one may see Malverns and the Welsh Hills, the plane of the Severn and the Severn Sea', where he was free from ‘the drill-sergeant and the pack'.

‘Pain', ‘Ballad of the Three Spectres' (its conclusion prophetic of Gurney's post-war suffering), ‘Servitude' (about how comradeship and ‘England' made the ‘heavy servitude' bearable), ‘Time and the Soldier' (on the slowness of the war), ‘After-Glow' (recalling Will Harvey after he'd heard a rumour that Harvey had been killed), ‘Song' and ‘Song and Pain' all date from this time. When the anthology
Soldier Poets
reached him in May, Gurney found in it ‘precious little of value but much of interest', with Julian Grenfell's ‘Into Battle' ‘easily the best' and Sorley's translation of part of
Faust
also fine. The death of Edward Thomas at Arras was ‘a great loss'. ‘Have you seen any verse by a man named Sassoon?' he asked Marion Scott. ‘I remember having seen quite good stuff,' particularly ‘Stretcher Case' (‘it is very good').

Gurney was back in France in July, preparing for the next offensive which became the third battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele. By then he'd heard about Sidgwick and Jackson's offer for his poems: not enough money, he thought, as the poems suited the increasingly dark view of the war. The collection was, he judged, ‘very interesting, very true, very coloured', without enough sustained ‘melody', perhaps slovenly in workmanship and lacking original thought, although its beauty surprised him. He saw in
Severn and Somme
‘hardly any of the devotion of self sacrifice, the splendid readiness for death that one finds in Grenfell, Brooke, Nichols etc', and wondered if this was because he was even more fragile than they were. Gurney doubted that artists should risk death when they could contribute to their country in other ways; ‘such is my patriotism, and I believe it to be the right kind'.

Severn and Somme
is introverted: more about the poet's turmoil and memories of Gloucestershire than about the war itself. Siegfried Sassoon's
The Old Huntsman
, published on 8 May 1917, has much more the feel of the trenches, although it included peacetime work like the long Georgian title poem. ‘It is good news that you have Sassoon's book,' Gurney wrote to Marion Scott on 31 July 1917, ‘which sounded interesting and sincere. Please tell me about it.' In August he was with a machine-gun unit, supposedly for his shooting ability. The country, even in its war-torn state, moved him, ‘a darling land' of ‘salt of the earth' peasants, without, he thought, the curse of England's ‘ugly towns and commodious villas, born of vulgarity, sluggish liver, greed and all uncharitableness'. He still looked to ‘noble and golden' Tewkesbury or Frampton on Severn, for ‘villages of the hills also are precious and clean'.

Towards the end of August Gurney wrote, ‘I hope you will send some more Sassoon, for his touch of romance and candour I like. He is one who tries to tell Truth, though perhaps not a profound truth.' Further reading of
The Old Huntsman
made him critical. The poet, he felt, could sacrifice meaning to beauty and be too journalistic or slack in technique. Gurney wondered if Sassoon wrote sometimes ‘to free himself from circumstance. They are charms to magic him out of the present. Cold feet, lice, sense of fear – all these are spurs to create Joy … Beauty is the only comfort.'

Was Sassoon ‘the half poet, the borrower of magic'? Ivor Gurney thought about this in ‘country like the last hell of desolation'. In the second week of September, he inhaled gas and collapsed. On 26 September, he wrote to Marion Scott from a hospital at Bangour in the Scottish borders. Craiglockhart – where, that month, Sassoon and Owen were patients – wasn't far away.

Sassoon's ‘The General' was written in hospital, scathing about inept commanders, aimed particularly at Pinney who'd ordered the last attack that had nearly killed the poet. The reviews of
The Old Huntsman
began to come, sometimes shocked, mostly favourable, accompanied by respectful if surprised letters from comrades at the front who'd got hold of the book; and, as a soldier poet, he met writers and intellectuals like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand Russell and Middleton Murry. The artist Glyn Philpot thought Sassoon Byronic when he painted his portrait, which pleased the sitter. Immersed in fame and flattery, Sassoon discussed with the pacifists Russell and Murry the idea of a public protest against the continuation of the war. Both of them, and the Morrells, were sure that this would have a great effect if it came from an officer who'd won the Military Cross.

The war, Sassoon declared in his statement (which accompanied a letter to his commanding officer), had become one of ‘aggression and conquest', and there should be immediate peace negotiations. Those at home showed, he believed, ‘a callous complacence' about the ‘agonies' at the front; and he was no longer prepared to fight. This was mutiny. Friends like Marsh were horrified; Robbie Ross, although in agreement, considered a public protest most unwise. Siegfried Sassoon's brother officers, from the front, admired the courage but not the sense.

Robert Graves thought it ‘completely mad'. He and Sassoon had stayed in close touch after their time together on the Somme and Graves's near-death at High Wood in July 1916. It had taken time for the army to realize that Graves was still alive; his pay had been stopped, notices had appeared in
The
Times
and his family had received many letters of sympathy.

Graves left hospital in the late summer of 1916 and went to his family home near Harlech, then in September 1916 to stay with Sassoon in Kent where he heard Siegfried's mother attempting to contact the spirit of her dead son Hamo, who'd been killed at Gallipoli in 1915. He rejoined his regiment in the freezing weather of January 1917, but was still thought not to be fit for the front line. By March he was judged to be exhausted, suffering from bronchitis, perhaps also the after-effects of his 1916 wounds. He was sent back to England, first to hospital at Somerville College, Oxford (where he fell in love with a girl for the first time), then for convalescence to the huge mansion built by Queen Victoria at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. It was at Osborne that Graves heard of Sassoon's protest. He became determined to try to save his friend from prosecution for mutiny, for which the sentence was death.

The outcome shows Sassoon's high reputation as an officer and also, possibly, the army's fear of the publicity that might accompany any trial. He was detained, in an oddly half-hearted way, at Litherland, the regimental depot near Liverpool. Meanwhile Graves got permission to leave Osborne and go north. But the authorities had little wish to prosecute; Graves persuaded Sassoon that he would not be made a martyr and should accept a diagnosis of shell shock. On 23 July, Sassoon arrived for treatment at Craiglockhart, supposedly escorted by Graves who, apparently in a worse state of nerves, had missed the train.