Today is one of the last days we’ll be hearing from Lady Dorothie Feilding. The war has hit her family again, killing her youngest brother not much more than a year after another brother died at Jutland. One of the family’s responses was to close the small hospital that had been operating in their country home. Lady Dorothie, her long honeymoon now shortened and her next stint of ambulance service yet to begin, wrote to her mother today, a century back, offering a hopeless solace:
I know so well how absolutely down & out you are. Thank God the hospital is closing & it won’t be so hard in London away from the dreadful memories of Newnham. Mother dearest I would so willingly have given myself to keep one of your two dear lads. But God did not seem to will it so. The poor mothers have so much, so much more to bear than anyone these dreadful days.[1]
That’s not the sort of letter that should be followed by a clever segue. The only other piece of writing I have today is from Gilbert Frankau, whom we last saw going out as an artilleryman. He’s not a likeable fellow, Frankau, but the reason he hasn’t appeared much here is simply that I don’t have much information on his daily whereabouts. His actual service came as an awkward addendum to my sparing use of his novel, Peter Jackson, in the early days of the war. It’s not a good novel, but it was illustrative of how a certain sort of Kitchener’s Army man (the bluff, confident, self-righteous businessman type) experienced 1914. And then it ceased having identifiable dates…
Frankau is between active service and novel-writing now, but not idle: he wrote some verse, today, a century back, which provides something of a bridge between the two. The speaker here urges a veteran to write a new sort of war literature:
Lord, if I’d half your brains, I’d write a book:
None of your sentimental platitudes.
But something real, vital; that should strip
The glamour from this outrage we call war.
Shewing it naked, hideous, stupid, vile–
One vast abomination. So that they
Who, coming after, till the ransomed fields
Where our lean corpses rotted in the ooze,
Reading my written words, should understand
This stark stupendous horror, visualize
The unutterable foulness of it all. . . .A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job: —
Men, lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid.
Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime
That wrenches gum-boot down from bleeding heel
And cakes in itching arm-pits, navel, ears:
Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering:
Men driving men to death and worse than death:
Men maimed and blinded: men against machines–
Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame and wire:
Men choking out their souls in poison-gas:
Men squelched into the slime by trampling feet:
Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away,
Cursing, with their last breath, the living God
Because He made them, in His image, men. . . .So–were your talent mine–I’d–write of war
For those who, coming after, know it not.
There are two problems here, from a certain point of view. The first is the question of talent raised by the writer himself. He piles on the pentameters, but this is not the sort of verse that will really answer its own question. The horrifying imagery is there, but it is inert, with neither the pity and subtlety that some writers will evoke nor the pointedness of Sassoon‘s angry satires.
So, yes, one “problem” with Frankau’s work is that he is not a good poet–merely putting the bowels back in (or out, as it were) doesn’t mean that one has taken war poetry in a new direction. It’s striking that he includes this Compleat Catalogue of Horrors, but it reads more as “Homeric” in the sense of “like Homer’s less skillful Roman-era imitators” than as a successful blending of true reportage and contemporary prosody. In the Iliad and the poems of Sassoon/Owen alike the verses of gore describe the death of individual warriors. There is attention, however brief, to their humanity. The verses above are piling on in such abundance that they begin to read like schlock rather than sympathy.
The other “problem” is that Frankau is–though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the lines above–staunchly pro-war, and writes often in support of the war effort and against criticism of its conduct. So, to combine the two and compound the offense (at least in the opinion of such as Sassoon or Graves), Frankau’s tin-eared blank verse leads up to a ratification of the warrior in the old heroic register:
And if posterity should ask of me
What high, what base emotions keyed weak flesh
To face such torments, I would answer: “You!
Not for themselves, O daughters, grandsons, sons,
Your tortured forebears wrought this miracle;
Not for themselves, accomplished utterly
This loathliest task of murderous servitude;
But just because they realized that thus,
And only thus, by sacrifice, might they
Secure a world worth living in — for you!*’ . . .
Good-night, my soldier-poet. Dormez bien![2]