We soldiers have our views of life to express, though the boom of death is in our ears. We try to convey something of what we feel in this great conflict to those who think of us, and sometimes, alas!, mourn our loss. We desire to let them know that in the midst of our keenest sadness for the joy of life we leave behind, we go to meet death grim-lipped, clear-eyed, and resolute-hearted.
John William Streets, 1916
The year 1915 was a good one for western literature, even a vintage one. T S Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier hurried a stubborn Victorian era towards the Modernist age. Meanwhile, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear and P G Wodehouse's Something Fresh all suggested that the embryonic bestseller was in rude health.
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Yet arguably the most enduring and enduringly popular literary movement of all was just beginning in the unlikeliest of places. That year also witnessed the first sustained production of poems written by soldier-poets on and from the battlegrounds of the First World War, in Flanders, France and Gallipoli. Over the next two years, writers like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg would produce some of the most anthologised verse of all time.
And yet, according to the contemporary poet and critic Walter de la Mare, writing in The Times Literary Supplement on July 1, 1915, these works should not have survived the circumstances that inspired them: "The fact that very little of the verse occasioned by the war is likely to survive it, that a century or so hence only the curious in the byways of literature will discover how busily ran our pens to the sound of the sword on the grindstone, is not a reflection of the sincerity of the poets … Any true quietness of mind just now is impossible. It is in the peace that is surely coming that poetry, we may hope, will renew its youth."
Whether this succeeds as a general conception of art, it is a conception of war literature that would be exploded in the coming months as the most inhumane experiences imaginable were transformed into great art. “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity,” Owen famously wrote. In the decades to come, it would be Owen and his peers who would shape the dominant narratives of the Great War — to such an extent that more idealistic war poetry would be diminished in the popular view.
In de la Mare's defence, most of these defining works (The General, Dulce et Decorum Est, Break of Day in the Trenches) would not be written until months after his review, and often not published for many years. But he does hint at one valuable question in his slightly pompous fashion. Why have the poems of the First World War survived and been so influential, not least for a new generation of American soldier-poets like Brian Turner and Kevin Powers, formed by the 21st century's conflicts in the Middle East?
One could, as de la Mare advises, return 100 years to 1915. By the time his review appeared, the year had already witnessed one of today's most recited war poems. In Flanders Fields was written on May 3 by John McCrae, a doctor serving with the Canadian artillery (it would be published that December in Punch).
Divided into three short stanzas totalling 16 lines in all, this simple elegy disproves de la Mare's prediction that war poetry could not outlast the combat that inspired it. Its presiding images have become iconic, emblematic of the Great War as a whole: fields, poppies, sunset, graves, birds, the sleep of death. Little wonder In Flanders Fields continues to be read annually at Anzac Day memorials to Gallipoli and at Remembrance Days across the world.
This power is not due to originality. McCrae drew on established tropes to evoke his depiction of war as transgression of resilient nature and a natural order: “the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row … in the sky / The larks, still bravely singing, fly / Scarce heard amid the guns below.”
But at its best, in the short four-line second stanza that tolls like funeral bells, McCrae’s tone hints at something like a fresh note: “We are the Dead. Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / Loved and were loved, and now we lie / In Flanders fields.”
Read a century on, McCrae’s short poem is in the vanguard of a revolution that pitted competing versions of war-writing against each other. On one side is the classical mode, perfected perhaps by the heroic abstractions of Rupert Brooke: “If I should die think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” On the other, the unflinching and deeply personal anthems for doomed youth that spoke from first-hand experience. In staging this contest, McCrae’s poem reflects broader and more momentous losses of innocence in war, in heroism and even the world as a whole.
One could see McCrae's fledgling innovations as ushering in what the American poet and critic Carolyn Forché calls the 20th century's "poetry of witness". Against Forgetting, her seminal collection of work, suggests there are as many definitions of poetic witness as there are poetic witnesses, but two central themes emerge. Extremity — war, genocide, exile, violence, oppression — and a writer's compulsion to record these experiences in personal verse.
Forché's anthology identifies the First World War as a formative moment, and includes work by Sassoon, Owen, e e cummings and André Breton among others. The war's "extremity" is familiar enough to be commonplace. One need only realise that McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields at the Second Battle of Ypres to understand the grimness of the context. This was where lethal chlorine gas was used for the first time on April 22 against French and Algerian positions. As John Keegan notes in The First World War, McCrae's Canadian forces would have felt the effects of its debut.
Other “advances” in weaponry — the machine gun, heavy artillery like howitzers, armoured tanks — enabled mass slaughter on scales unimaginable only a few years before. The widespread use of trench warfare, and by implication the creation of No-Man’s Land, meant that hundreds of thousands died in the cause of fractional advances.
Gone were the days, at least for those at the front, when Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade rendered bloody cavalry clashes in excited, excitable rhythms and faceless abstractions like the "noble six hundred". This new form of war, defined by claustrophobia, constant physical discomfort, boredom and an underlying sense of futility, required new forms of verse — more sombre, more chaotic and emotive.
This is most clearly seen in the writing of Wilfred Owen, arguably the most famous poet of the First World War. Owen’s transformation from idealistic if snobbish recruit to disillusioned chronicler of wasted youth is emblematic of a wider loss of innocence effected by the Great War.
Born in rural England in 1893, he was raised a devout Anglican before becoming an ardent poetry reader, especially the Romantic verse of John Keats. Having enlisted in 1915, he was sent to the front a year later with the Manchester Regiment. His initial ardour was eroded by a series of injuries. Diagnosed with shell shock, he was sent to Craighlockhart Hospital in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, whose terse, realistic poems and criticism of the war shaped his own voice.
Owen returned to the front, and served with considerable courage: he was awarded the Military Cross for leading his unit against enemy positions in Joncourt. His death in November 1918, just one week before the Armistice, seems symbolic of the futility of the war he described with such intensity.
The jagged rhythmic changes of Dulce et Decorum Est, which judders from exhausted sluggishness to sudden, horrifying violence ("Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling") in the space of a line ending. Anthem for Doomed Youth starts as a bitter anti-elegy ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns") and ends with melancholy remembrance of cheerless mourning back home: "The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall".
One can see how Forché’s poetry of witness — at once personal and extreme, morally complex and deliberately unsettling — challenges the conventions of the detached classical tradition. “I think it better that in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent” wrote W B Yeats on February 6, 1915. Yet the times were a changing. Old pieties and proprieties were being rewritten hourly on the front, even if they were yet to be felt back home.
In the introduction to Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men — a collection of verse published in September 1916 — Galloway Kyle, the editor of Poetry Review, argues: "The soldier-poets leave the maudlin and the mock-heroic, the gruesome and fearful handling of Death and his allies to the neurotic civilian who stayed behind to gloat on imagined horrors and inconveniences and anticipate the uncomfortable demise of friends."
Turn to page 17, however, and you read No Man's Land by Major H D'A of the 55th Division in France. "Sprung from hell / Monsters fell / Invisible / Await who venture through No-Man's Land, / Like a stab in the dark is the death they deal / From an eye of fire in a skull of steel / When the echoes wake to their thunder peal / In No Man's-Land." Major D'A is unlikely to win a place in the pantheon of great writers, but this is gruesome and fearful, not as the stuff of nightmares, but as the daily reality of hundreds of thousands of men.
Sassoon would later turn Kyle's depiction of stoic soldiers and prurient civilians upside down. His short, sardonic Blighters fantasises that the hideous realities of war be visited upon a drunk, complacent theatre audience for whom combat is light entertainment: "I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, / Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, sweet Home,' / And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls / To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume."
In 1915, these “riddled corpses” were actively redefining outmoded ideas of heroism, not least in the ferocious engagements between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire on Gallipoli. Keegan describes the campaign as “one of the Great War’s most terrible battles but also its only epic”. Various imperial interests — Russian, British, French and Turkish — rested on controlling the Dardanelles Strait. The naval and infantry battles that began in February 1915 and lasted until January of the following year were frequently chaotic, bloody and dogged by poor planning. The cost of human life was profound on both the Allied and Turkish sides. Keegan estimates 300,000 Turkish soldiers were killed, missing or wounded. The Allied numbers were in the region of 265,000. The disastrous landing of Australian and New Zealand forces on April 25 is marked by Anzac Day: the early exchanges alone led to 14,000 deaths on the Turkish side, and almost 10,000 for the Anzacs. Dubbed a failure by Keegan, the campaign descended into a damaging stalemate. Reports of poor military planning lead to pressure from the British public for a British withdrawal.
With Troy visible across the water, Gallipoli was a location ripe with symbolism, something Patrick Shaw-Stewart exploited in his little known Achilles in the Trenches:
I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.
This uncertain whispering of self-preservation is very different from the heroic verse of Shaw-Stewart’s friend Rupert Brooke, who died of sepsis en route to Gallipoli, or the formal comforts of Australian poet Tom Skeyhill: “Your graves may neglected be, but fond memory will remain, / The story of your gallant charge will ease the grief and pain”. Time offers Shaw-Stewart no such consolation.
Such emotional turmoil makes a mockery of de la Mare's earlier belief that "quietness of mind" is necessary for poetic creation. Shaw-Stewart's Achilles was written during three days' leave, and the peace only intensifies his sense of the storms lying in wait. What he demands from bygone heroes is not valour but knowledge to assuage the fear of death: "Was it so hard, Achilles, / So very hard to die? / Thou knowest, and I know not; / So much the happier am I."
On April 11, 1916, The Times printed a sonnet entitled Gallipoli in its letters page. It was written by John William Streets, a sergeant in the 12th York and Lancasters, probably in December of the previous year during the 31st Division's defence of the Suez Canal.
Upon the margin of a rugged shore
There is a spot now barren, desolate,
A place of graves, sodden with human gore
That Time will hallow, Memory consecrate.
There lie the ashes of the mighty dead,
The youth who lit with flame Obscurity,
Fought true for Freedom, won thro’ rain of lead,
Undying fame, their immortality.
The stranger wand’ring when the war is over,
The ploughman there driving his coulter deep,
The husbandman who golden harvests reap —
From hill and ravine, from each plain and cover
Will hear a shout, see phantoms on the marge,
See men again making a deathless charge.
Like In Flanders Fields, Gallipoli stands at a crossroads between heroic purity and the poetry of witness. Streets seems to feel something of this himself, beginning "Upon the margin of a rugged shore …" On one side is inescapable evidence of death, described with unflinching sorrow: "There is a spot now barren, desolate, / A place of graves, sodden with human gore".
Yet for Streets, unlike Shaw-Stewart, grief is relieved by a broader sense of history: “Time will hallow, Memory consecrate”. Religious undertones resound as immortalised soldiers make their “deathless charge”.
Galloway Kyle praised Gallipoli as "illustrative of the fine spirit animating the New Army". War, as Sassoon and Owen recognised, has a way of ironising such idealism. Streets' short biography in Kyle's Soldier Poets notes that he was "wounded and missing, July 1916", just weeks after his sonnet was printed. Having fought at the Somme, Streets was killed, his body lying in No-Man's Land for 10 months before it was recovered and identified.
The final word deservedly belongs to this brave and little-known poet. Here is the end of his sonnet, Love of Life, whose optimism heard a century on sounds almost unbearably poignant:
For I shall live
In the proud consciousness that thou dost give,
And if thy twilight fingers round me steal
And draw me unto death — thy votary
Am I, O Life, reach out thy hands to me!
James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.
