The Mad Soldier

I dropp’d here three weeks ago, yes – I know,

And it’s bitter cold at night, since the fight –

I could tell you if I chose – no one knows

Excep’ me and four or five, what ain’t alive.

I can see them all asleep, three men deep,

And they’re nowhere near a fire – but our wire

Has ’em fast as fast can be. Can’t you see

When the flare goes up? Ssh! boys; what’s that noise?

Do you know what these rats eat? Body-meat!

After you’ve been down a week, an’ your cheek

Gets as pale as life, and night seems as white

As the day, only the rats and their brats

Seem more hungry when the day’s gone away –

An’ they look big as bulls, an’ they pulls

Till you almost sort o’ shout – but the drought

What you hadn’t felt before makes you sore.

And at times you even think of a drink . . .

There’s a leg across my thighs – if my eyes

Weren’t too sore, I’d like to see who it be,

Wonder if I’d know the bloke if I woke?

Woke? By damn, I’m not asleep – there’s a heap

Of us wond’ring why the hell we’re not well . . .

Leastways I am – since I came it’s the same

With the others – they don’t know what I do,

Or they wouldn’t gape and grin. – It’s a sin

To say that Hell is hot – ’cause it’s not:

Mind you, I know very well we’re in hell. –

In a twisted hump we lie – heaping high,

Yes! an’ higher every day. – Oh I say

This chap’s heavy on my thighs – damn his eyes.

He was killed by a sniper during the Battle of the Somme on 22nd September, 1916.

The poem "The Mad Soldier" was written three months before his death

He left school, at fourteen to start an apprenticeship with Carl Hentschel, a Fleet Street engraver. He became interested in both poetry and visual art and attended evening classes at Birkbeck College while saving to study art. He left his apprenticeship in 1911 to study for two years at the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied alongside Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash (famous for his drawings of life in the trenches) and Dora Carrington.

He exhibited work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery 1914 before ill health led him to travel to South Africa. Encouraged by Laurence Binyon, he had began writing poetry and had a pamphlet of ten poems published in 1912. When the war broke out he wrote a poem "On Receiving News of the War" before returning home where he published a second volume.

While many wrote of 'noble sacrifice', Rosenberg was critical rom the outset. In a letter he wrote, "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over."

However, unable to find permanent employment, Rosenberg enlisted in the army in October 1915 joining the 12th Bantam Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. (A 'bantam' battalion was one composed of men of short height.) He continued to write poems from the Western Front, two were published by Poetry Magazine in late 1916.

After several bouts of ill health and a failed attempt to join a Jewish regiment in Mesopotamia, he was transferred to the King's Own Royal Regiment (KORL) and joined the 'Spring Offensive' on the Western Front in March 1918. A week later he sent home his last poem from the war. Having just finished night patrol he was killed either by a sniper or in close combat.

Rosenberg and five KORL comrades were buried in a mass grave. In 1926, the unidentified remains of the six soldiers were individually re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Saint-Laurent-Blangy. , His gravestone is marked with his name and the words, "Buried near this spot", as well as – "Artist and Poet".

Rosenberg's "Poems from the Trenches" are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during World War 1. Self portraits hand in both the National Portrait and Tate Britain galleries. Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory" says Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches" as "the greatest poem of the war." . Rosenberg is one of the 16 WW1 poets memorialised on the stone in Poet's Corner Westminster Abbey.

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

The Moles

I’ve been in a trench for fifteen days,

I’m choked for the want of air;

It’s harvest time where my mother stays,

And I’m wishing that I was there.

I’ve ceased to count in the scheme of things,

My courage has waned and set;

It’s trysting-time where the mavis sings

And I’m wishing I could forget.

With straightened shoulders and hearts that sang

“For Freedom and Liberty!”

That was the battle-cry that sang

From the men-that-we-used-to-be.

We’ve learnt the law of shot and shell,

We’ve learnt the law of steel;

But the Law of the Trench is a cultured Hell

For it stifles the power to feel.

Death we have ventured many times

Nor flinched at the sacrifice,

But if this be the debt of our youthful crimes –

Lord God we have paid the price!

We’re growing inanimate: Bit by bit

We’re getting inert – decayed;

The score of our sins was boldly writ

But Mother of God – we’ve paid!

And this is our Fate: When the Gods are kind

Our existence shall simply cease –

A sniper’s bullet – a trench that’s mined! –

God-speed, and a quick release!

He had been in the army and been on the personal staffs of Kitchener in India [he commanded a unit of Sikhs in WW1] and the King before going on the stage. In January 1915 Horne sailed from the USA to join his old regiment and was commissioned as Captain in the 7th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers. During these the final year of his life he wrote a number of verses sent to his wife in America.

The preface to Songs of the Shrapnel Shell and Other Verses, published posthumously in 1916, says many of the poems were written in the trenches, between attacks with shells “shrieking overhead, [and] mines and countermines exploding underneath" He lived for more than a year half-underground, like the moles in one of his poems, with little hope of getting out alive. He wrote often scribbled in pencil upon scraps of paper, and sent them to the wife he had left behind.

Horne took over command of ‘A’ Company as one of the few officers to survive the first day of the Battle of Loos (25 September 1915) unharmed. He was killed on 27th January 1916 in Mazingarbe in France whilst trying to rescue a wounded soldier lying in front of the trench. A shrapnel shell exploded overhead, killing both men.

Jeffery Day DSC

1886-1918

Miles Jeffery Day was born in Huntingdonshire and educated at Repton School before receiving a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service at the age of 18 in 1915.

He gained a reputation as a skilled and daring flyer and was promoted to flight lieutenant a year later and spent time as a test pilot before going into operational service.

He was rapidly promoted becoming a Flight Commander and joined No. 13 Squadron RNAS in December 191. He was awarded the DSC “for great skill and bravery as a fighting pilot” but was already dead when the award was announced in February 1918.

He was shot down by six German aircraft which he attacked single-handed, out at sea.

His commanding officer wrote in his published poems that

“He hit the enemy and they hit his machine, which burst into flames; but, not a bit flurried, he nose-dived, flattened out, and landed perfectly on the water. He climbed out of his machine and waved his fellow-pilots back to their base; being in aeroplanes they could not assist him”

Despite an immediate air sea search, no trace was found of him or his aircraft.

Initially Day wrote humorous verses but had begun writing serious poems, encouraged by his friend the poet Edward Hilton Young. Only three were published during his lifetime including “To My Brother”. A collection of his poems – Poems and Rhymes – was published posthumously in 1919.

Extract from 'To My Brother'

At first, when unaccustomed to death’s sting,

I thought that, should you die, each sweetest thing,

each thing of any merit on this earth,

would perish also, beauty, love, and mirth:

and that the world, despoiled and God-forsaken,

its glories gone, its greater treasures taken,

would sink into a slough of apathy

and there remain into eternity,

a mournful-minded, soul-destroying place

wherein there would be seen no smiling face,

where all desire to love and live would cease,

and death would be the only way to peace.

And when one day the aching blow did fall

for many days I did not live at all,

but, dazed and halting, made my endless way

painfully though a tangled growth of grey

and clinging thorns, dismal, towards belief,

and uncontrollable, heart-racking grief.

It could not be! – that one so fair and strong,

so honest-minded, and so void of wrong,

that one who made such splendid use of life,

whose smile could soothe the bitterness of strife

and make a cold, hard nature warm and soft

(who used to smile so frankly and so oft)

should die, and leave our spirits numb and breaking,

grief-stifled, and yet empty, sick, and breaking.

'To My Brother' was Day's response to the death of his elder brother, Dennis Ivor Day, who was shot by a sniper at Vermelles on 25 September 1915 and died from his wounds on 7 October 1915.

In Memoriam (Easter 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again. 

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

Remembering again that I shall die

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks

For washing me cleaner than I have been

Since I was born into this solitude.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

But here I pray that none whom once I loved

Is dying to-night or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,

Either in pain or thus in sympathy

Helpless among the living and the dead,

Like a cold water among broken reeds,

Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

Like me who have no love which this wild rain

Has not dissolved except the love of death,

If love it be towards what is perfect and

Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint. 

Aspens

All day and night, save winter, every weather,

Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,

The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing

Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn

The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –

The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,

And over lightless pane and footless road,

Empty as sky, with every other sound

Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails

In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,

In tempest or the night of nightingales,

To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

And it would be the same were no house near.

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

We cannot other than an aspen be

That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

Or so men think who like a different tree.

Memorial to the 'War Poets' Poets Corner Westminster Abbey unveiled 11th November 1985

Thomas married his wife Helen while an undergraduate and worked as a book reviewer, reviewing up to 15 books every week.

He was a widely published author, literary critic and biographer by the time the war began, famous for writing about the countryside which has led to the popular misconception of him as an 'English' poet when in fact he was Welsh. He published a successful novel in 1913, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans .

He was a close friend of Welsh poet W H Davies and was almost entirely responsible for his success just as another close friend, the American poet Robert Frost, was responsible for his. Though Thomas thought poetry the highest form of literature, he did not become a poet until the end of 1914 (and then under a pseudonym 'Edward Eastway'). Frost encouraged him to write poetry during long walks together. Frost's best known poem "The Road Not Taken" was inspired by tThomas's indecision about whether to write poetry.

Edward Thomas joined the Artists’ Rifles in July 1915 partially in response to Frost's poem which he took to be criticism. He was promoted first to corporal and the 2nd Lieutenant, taking a commission in the Royal Artillery before going to France in early 1917. Asked by his friend the poet Eleanor Farjeon why he had joined up Thomas picked up some earth and crumbled it in his hand and replied ‘Literally, for this.’

Thomas was killed in action on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917 soon after arriving at Arras. To spare his wife, she was told his death was bloodless resulting from the shock impact of a shell blast but a letter from his commanding officer found in the USA many years later confirmed he had been shot through the chest.

Thomas is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Agny, France (Row C, Grave 43).

Edward Thomas is commonly thought of as a 'war poet' but few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He is also widely thought of as an 'English Poet' because of his subject matter and having been born in London. However, his parents were both Welsh and Welsh speakers. Thomas wrote about Wales, [his only novel "The Happy Go-Lucky M0rgans" is about a Welsh family], was proud of his Welsh heritage and thought of himself as a Welsh poet. Some of his poems were written in "Cynghanedd" the 600 year old (in 1914) traditional Welsh Bardic poetry ("The downs will lose the sun, white alyssum / Lose the bees’ hum") "Aspens", regarded as a an innovating poems, was written whilst on leave in 1915 and is an example of a Cynghanedd influenced poem.

Thomas would undoubtedly have gone on to be one of the greatest C20th poets. Ted Hughes considered him to be one of the founders of modern poetry and the "father of us all" He was admired by Walter de la Mare, Ivor Gurney and Eleanor Farjeon who was a friend of Edward and his wife Helen and probably in love with him. His poetry may well have influenced the Cynghanedd in Dylan Thomas's poetry and Dylan regularly talked of his poetry in public performances and broadcasts. The Caedmon series of recordings by Dylan includes him reading Thomas's poem "The Owl" [Dylan Thomas Reading Vol.4 Caedmon Literary Series TC1061 1957].

Edward Thomas is one of the 16 WW1 poets on the Westminster Abbey memorial in Poets Corner. There is a memorial window to him in Steep Church and a stone memorial outside the village.

A study centre dedicated to his work is based in Petersfield Museum.

His widow Helen published two autobiographical accounts of her life with Edward Thomas. According to their daughter Myfanwy, her mother wrote encouraged by Eleanor Farjeon as a form of therapy to rid herself of the deep depression she suffered after his death. Throughout their marriage she was content to be the unassuming wife and mother of a great writer but her autobiography is a work of beautiful writing and deeply moving. Helen Thomas was a full century ahead of her time in talking openly of her husbands bi-polar depression and disarmingly frank about their passionate sexual life. They are published with some letters and reminiscences of her youngest daughter Myfanwy as "Under Storms Wing" by Carcanet. 

LINK

Petersfield Museum      www.petersfieldmuseum.co.uk/collection/edward-thomas

The Old Courthouse, St Peter’s Road, Petersfield GU32 3HX · 01730 262601

A NOTE

Post Traumatic Shock 

Disorder

Nowadays, we are well informed about PTSD; how it manifests itself and how devastating it is, an invisible disability. Other wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, have brought us face to face with the mental price we expect service personnel to pay. During world war one, it was different. "Shell Shock", as it was known, was little understood. Many were labelled cowards or malingerers. Most suffered in silence both during and in the decades after 1918. Yet we now know that countless thousands suffered. Their distinctive faces stare out many war photographs, the "5 Mile Stare" as it was known! By the time the war ended 80,000 had been treated for it, but modern estimates suggest the number of sufferers could have been as high as 325,000 and given the unending horror of the trenches it is easy to cast doubt on whether this estimate is realistic. A sympathetic, curative response began in WW1 in a few hospitals staffed by more empathetic and intelligent doctors. Netley military hospital near Southampton and Portsmouth's St James (briefly) treated men with shell shock. Films were shown of the success achieved at Netley but the hospital isolated PTSD sufferers hiding them away in an annex and recent analysis has proven that these films, meant for release in cinemas, were faked demonstrating that the hospital was more concerned in getting the men back to the Front than in responding to their suffering. One notable exception was the work of W H Rivers at Craiglockart Military Hospital at Edinburgh. A polymath psychiatrist influenced by Freud, Rivers and his staff revolutionised the treatment of their patients though there were disagreements as to whether physical exercise rather than 'therapies' was the most effective approach. Famously, two of Rivers patients were the poets Siegfried Sassoon (sent there through the timely intervention of powerful friends following his famous challenge to the military "donkeys") and Wilfred Owen who had suffered a mental breakdown at the front. Owen's doctor encouraged him to write as a therapeutic activity in which Sassoon helped him (Owen had achieved little success with his poetry and was intent on giving up writing). The work of Rivers and his team started a slow (sadly too slow) change in the approach to mental health and combat which is still being progressed today. A letter to his sister from Craiglockart is an insight to the trauma of shell shock and the horror that caused it -

"You know it was not the Bosche that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old Cock Robin (as we used to call 2/Lt Gaukroger), who lay not only near by, but in various places around and about, if you understand. I hope you don’t!"

In 1930 the "Mental Treatment Act" introduced out patient treatment rather than incarceration in an 'asylum' and marks the first positive step to a more enlightened and realistic treatment of the devastating impact of PTSD. Today, like Wilfred Owen, many ex-service personnel find poetry, creative writing, performance poetry and art help them adjust to and resolve the trauma.

At Craiglockart, Wilfred Owen met Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged him to persevere with his poetry, mentored and helped him hone his art. "Anthem For Doomed Youth is known to be one of the poems Sassoon influenced. 

LINK

BBC    "Did Craiglockart hospital revolutionise mental health care?"

At Craiglockart, Wilfred Owen met Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged him to persevere with his poetry, mentored and helped him hone his art. One of his best known poems "Anthem For Doomed Youth is known to have been reshaped through Sassoon's advice and guidance.

Anthem For Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds

1914

War broke: and now the Winter of the world

With perishing great darkness closes in.

The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,

Is over all the width of Europe whirled,

Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled

Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin

Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.

The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,

And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,

An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,

A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.

But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need

Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

The Next War

"War's a joke for me and you,

Wile we know such dreams are true."

- Siegfried Sassoon

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to

Death,-

Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,-

Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.

We've sniffed the green thick odour of his

breath,-

Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.

He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed

Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,

We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!

We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old

chum.

No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.

We laughed, -knowing that better men would

come,

And greater wars: when each proud fighter

brags

He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

He had a modest lower middle class upbringing and was educated at Birkenhead Institute, Shrewsbury Technical School and finally as a pupil-teacher in Wyle Coop School, Shrewsbury where he won a place at London University. Unable to afford the place without a scholarship, he worked as a lay assistant to a vicar near Reading and studied part-time at the university.

During the early years of the war he lived in France teaching English and only returned to England in 1915 having first considered joining the French Army.

In October 1915, he enlisted in the Artists Rifles training in Essex before being commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. At the Front, he fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion and was later he was blown up by a trench mortar and unconscious for several days before being found. He was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia or shell shock and sent to Craiglockart where his encounter with Sassoon would change his life.

Owen might have stayed on home-duty indefinitely but returned to active service in France in July 1918 seeing it his duty to add his voice to that of Sassoon telling the horrific realities of the war. Sassoon was vehemently opposed to the idea and Owen did not inform him until he was in France. A month later, he stormed an enemy post, possibly emulating Sassoon, and was awarded the Military Cross although his citation came after he was dead.

LINKS

Wilfred Owen Association     www.wilfredowen.org.uk

Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas www.hrc.utexas.edu

Two Poets at Paaschendaele

Though they never met, two talented war poets died within a few hours of each other on the first day of the Battle of Paaschendaele (31 July 1917). Both came from poor working class backgrounds. Both wrote about the countryside of their homeland (one Eire one Wales). Both need not have fought. Both had strong reasons not to enlist but did so for the noblest of reasons. They are buried in the same cemetery.