Several poems could take pride of place today, but neither Vera Brittain‘s wan “Requiem” (written this month) nor the really awful–and loathsome–poem by Gilbert Frankau (carried by The Daily Mail[1] of today, a century back) is quite the right note for the last “month poem” of this project.
Brittain, our quintessential survivor of loss, looks backward (or beyond) and addresses the dead–“Be glad you’ll rest in the peace of a deep dark night”–while Frankau looks ahead, and pushes his politics. His jolly little genocidal rhyme, really truly entitled “The Beasts in Gray,” appears to argue against any armistice or surrender.
Remembering these, Free Peoples,
By the God of your Fathers, slay!
Let the sword decide what the sword began:
“No truce with the Beasts in Gray!”
Each of these two briefly excerpted poems is, in different ways, traditional. So let’s be modern instead.
Richard Aldington is neither my favorite writer nor an altogether terrific soldier/husband/human being (and yes, those two judgments shouldn’t influence each other, yet they do), but his poetry is… interesting, and he makes a strong claim for the spot: he’s written a letter even as a previous war poem is being punished.
Aldington was drafted in 1916 and has seen a good deal of time in the army, though little action–yet. But now he knows that his battalion will be in the next battle. And this time it seems clear that the next push really will be the last push. But a push nonetheless–so Aldington writes a “last letter” to his mostly-estranged wife, the poet H.D., due to give birth to her quondam lover’s child some time this winter.
1 November 1918
Dear Astraea/
Herewith blank cheque–only to be used if I am killed. It will save any trouble about duties &c. Just go to Cox’s & find my balance & make out cheque accordingly.
Don’t forget to put another penny stamp on it.
You are entitled to a pension in the event I mention — see you get it.
We go over the top in a couple of days. Hence these gloomy words!
Cheerio! The war’s nearly over, I think. So you’ll be all right.
Richard.[2]
This month’s issue of Poetry will feature “Prayers and Fantasies,” a poem that Aldington had writte in France in the spring. Now, if you take a sprawling, undisciplined, insistently learned, mediocre Modernist poem and snip out whatever bits you like, you can probably make the vatic phrases and curated images seem both relevant and trenchant to a great many matters-at-hand… Nevertheless, these two stanzas (three and six of eight) do very well to point us toward the end (in several senses) of war poetry.
Slowly, too slowly, the night, with its noise and its fear and its murder, yields to the dawn. One by one the guns cease. Quicker, O dawn, quicker — dazzle the hateful stars, lighten for us the weight of the shadows.
The last rat scuttles away; the first lark thrills with a beating of wings and song. The light is soft; deliberately, consciously, the young dawn moves. My unclean flesh is penetrated with her sweetness and she does not disdain even me.
Out of the East as from a temple comes a procession of girls and young men, smiling, brave, candid, ignorant of grief.
Few know the full bitterness of night, but they alone will know the full beauty of dawn — if dawn ever comes…
The pseudo-erotic evocation of Greek cult practices is… a Modernist thing, I suppose. But the rat and the lark, together, are the twin totems of the war’s poetry, of whatever stripe, movement, or allegiance.
Escape, let the soul escape from this insanity, this insult to God, from this ruined landscape, these murdered fields, this bitterness, this agony, from this harsh death and disastrous mutilation, from this filth and labor, this stench of dead bodies and unwashed living bodies — escape, let the soul escape!
Let the soul escape and move with emotion along ilex walks under a quiet sky. There, lingering for a while beside the marble head of some shattered Hermes, it strews the violets of regret for a lost loveliness as transient as itself. Or perhaps, by some Homeric sea, watching the crisp foam blown by a straight wind, it gathers sea-flowers, exquisite in their acrid restraint of color and austere sparseness of petal.
There, perhaps, among flowers, at twilight, under the glimmer of the first stars, it will find a sensation of a quiet, almost kindly universe, indifferent to this festering activity.
Actually, while we’re here, let’s give Aldington his last stanza, too:
The moon high-seated above the ridge, fills the ruined village with tranquil light and black broken shadows — ruined walls, shattered timbers, piles of rubbish, torn-up ground, almost beautiful in this radiance, in this quiet June air. Lush grass in the tangled gardens sways very softly, and white moths dart over the bending sprays.
Somehow to-night the air blows clearer, sweeter — the chemistry of earth is slowly purifying the corrupting bodies, the waste and garbage of armies. Sweetness, darkness, clean peace — the marble rock of some Greek island, piercing its sparse garment of lavenders and mints like a naked nymph among rustling leaves.
Heavy-scented the air to-night — new-mown hay? — a pungent exotic odor — ah! phosgene. . . .
And to-morrow there will be huddled corpses with blue horrible faces and foam on their writhed mouths.
Rowland Feilding has left Lille behind and is once more hard on the heels of the retreating Germans. And once more his attention is seized by the French people he interacts with. They have been so long–and so far–behind the lines, that they behave rather more as an occupied people now free than as human beings in the middle of a combat zone.
The sang-froid of the villagers who have remained is extraordinary. They do not even send away their children, which rather suggests the courage of ignorance, and it is horrifying to see the poor little things playing about, unconscious of the dangers threatening them. It is all so unnecessary. Apart from the “crump” there is a frequent hail of bits from the anti-aircraft shells, besides the constant possibility of a bullet fired at or from an aeroplane. Yet not a woman or child has any protection, except the cellar. They go about with bare heads and without gas masks. Yesterday, as my Adjutant (Davenport) and I arrived opposite our new Headquarters, a 5.9 inch shell greeted us… Expecting a second shell we stepped behind a cottage. A woman came out to have a look. I said: “Ne serait il pas plus sauf pour yous dans la cave.” To which she replied: “Et pourquoi pas pour vous?”
More than most of our writers, Feilding makes an effort to condescend (in the Austenian sense–that is, politely) to members of lower classes, and he is a man of considerable empathy, as we will soon see. But who can resist a proper comtesse, performing a dashing feminism cloaked in noblesse oblige?
As I have said, we are now engaged in “comic opera” warfare. One of my front line Company Commanders has
his Headquarters in a chateau by a lake, surrounded by a green wooded park. Its name is the Château Beauregard. The daughter of the house. Countess Therêse de Germiny–as charming as her chateau—is still in residence, her father being dead and her brothers at the war. She is a sort of Lady Bountiful to a large number of villagers, who have congregated and live with her in the cellars. It is inspiring to see this wonderful woman, determined to hang on, as she said to-day, unless or until the evacuation of the village is ordered. Each evening, she and her protegees hold a service in a cellar, while the shells fall in the park and lake, and the enemy (according to his custom as night falls) traverses her shrubberies with machine-guns.I found her without any protection against gas, so have had my gas sergeant and pioneers at work to-day, making one of her cellars gas-proof; and we have also removed some of the occupants of the cellar, who were down with influenza…
I dreamed last night that there was an armistice and was woken by the sound of shells.[3]
Then it was a good dream…
Interestingly, Sapper Martin, who has just had to burn his leave pass to conceal that he overstayed by a day and thus is liable for fourteen days of the barbaric Field Punishment #1, has heard precisely the same rumor that Feilding reported a few days ago. As he marches through Courtrai, Martin notices
…the large number of Allied flags that are flying in every town, village and hamlet through which we pass. (It turned out that this was an instance of Fritz’s business acumen, When retirement was inevitable he sent his bagmen with loads of Allied flags and sold them to the natives!)[4]
Somehow this anecdote–paranoia-in-a-minor-key instead of race hatred, profiteering instead of children playing in fields of fire–seems a merciful way to end the day, and begin the last, shortest month of the war…
References and Footnotes
- One of the militarist papers that Wilfred Owen has just singled out for its laughable propaganda. ↩
- Zilboorg, Richard Aldington and H.D., 132. Incidentally, there is a strange error in Herbert Read's letters--which he himself edited (the error is picked up by his biographer). He puts an undated letter mentioning his fast new friendship with Aldington in between the October and November letters... but Aldington was not smarming around Piccadilly at this point, but rather getting ready to go forward in the war's final major attack. They don't seem to have met until after the war. ↩
- War Letters to a Wife, 341-2. ↩
- Sapper Martin, 248. ↩
