On 1 July 1916, a 28-year-old American member of the French foreign legion was caught in German machine-gun fire. Alan Seeger was the first Allied poet to be killed or injured on the Somme, on the first day of what was to become a four-and-a-half-month battle, one of the bloodiest and most indecisive of a bloody, drawn-out war. Earlier in the war, Seeger had written a poem that, season aside, prefigured his fate:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
Just a few hours later, another machine gun killed WN Hodgson, son of a Bishop and a classics scholar in Christ Church, Oxford, Hodgson volunteered at the outbreak of war, and his poetry displays a more accepting attitude to “the work of men” than many better-known poets of the first world war. Nevertheless, in quiet poems like Back to Rest, he documented the extreme nature of life in the trenches.
Death whining down from heaven,
Death roaring from the ground,
Death stinking in the nostril,
Death shrill in every sound,
Doubting we charged and conquered –
Hopeless we struck and stood;
Now when the fight is ended
We know that it was good.
Around the same time, Will Streets was wounded in a hail of enemy bullets. Streets was from a very different background to Hodgson, and although a bright student who was offered a place at grammar school, he went down the mines at the age of 14 to help support his large family. Despite the draining nature of the work, he continued to study classics and French at night and taught in his local Sunday school. Streets signed up soon after the war started and wrote poems while training and serving in Egypt and France. In these, he regularly looks for an escape from the realities of combat through observing the natural world that endures around him.
Peace can be found in strife: artillery
Are belching forth this sweet, entrancing morn
Their projectiles of death: yet as in scorn,
Lost in the sky’s clear, blue serenity
The larks in music sing their love new-born,
Trilling its joy, its natural ecstasy;
The butterfly along Life’s drift is borne;
And seeking nectar drones the wand’ring bee.
Streets made it back to get his wounds treated, and then went to the assistance of another wounded man. He wasn’t seen again until his body was found in November 1917.
Gilbert Waterhouse was a London-based architect who enlisted as a private in September 1914 and who later applied for and received a commission. The circumstances of his death are somewhat obscure and the official announcement didn’t happen until March of the following year. However, it is clear that he was wounded and died on 1 July. His trench poems show a wryly ironic attitude to the vicissitudes of the soldier’s life.
Someville is the Railhead for bully beef and tea,
Matches and candles, and (good for you and me)
Cocoa and coffee and biscuits by the tin,
Sardines, condensed milk, petrol and paraffin.
Truck-load and train-load and lorries by the score,
Mule-cart and limber, “what are yer waitin’ for ?”
Dusty and dirty and full of noisy din,
“If ’e fights upon ’is stomach, this ’ere army oughter win!”
A Scot by birth and education, Alexander Robertson worked as a lecturer in history at Sheffield before enlisting. Like Streets, he served in Egypt before being moved to France, and also like Streets, he died at the village of Serre on 1 July. His death also seems foreshadowed in a poem called Lines Before Going.
Soon is the night of our faring to regions unknown,
There not to flinch at the challenge suddenly thrown
By the great process of Being – daily to see
The utmost that life has of horror and yet to be
Calm and the masters of fear.
Of course, the carnage on the Somme didn’t end on the first day, and a number of other poets were killed or injured before hostilities ground to a halt on 18 November. These include EA Mackintosh, Leslie Coulson, Philip Johnstone, Hugh Smith, Edward Wyndham Tennant, RE Vernède and Cyril Winterbotham.
One other casualty was David Jones, who was injured in the attack on Mametz Wood, some 10 days into the battle. Jones was to write the greatest of all first world war poems, In Parenthesis, whose protagonist John Ball crawls to safety after being wounded in the wood in the climactic passage of the poem:
It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle.
Leave it under the oak.
Leave it for a salvage-bloke
let it lie bruised for a monument
dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful.
A century on, you might well ask why we should commemorate these dead and wounded poets when so many died. Poetry, as Auden said, makes nothing happen, after all. While this may be true, poetry can record what happens in a very particular way, and the first world war poets bore witness to the realities of the trenches in a way no other medium managed. These realities were a world removed from the jingoism of the press and government. There is, for instance, little or no hatred of those whom Jones, in the dedication to In Parenthesis, describes as “the enemy front fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure”. It may be salutary in these days of division to be reminded of this consciousness of the shared humanity of those who fought and died in that “great” European war.
And so this month’s Poster poems challenge is an unusual one. Rather than setting a particular theme or form for you to write on, this time I’m asking for poems of witness and of shared humanity. I can think of no more fitting memorial to the poets, and to all others, who died on the Somme.
