2,497: The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry edited by George Walter

In a world where many, if not most, “classics” can be obtained online or on e-reader for nothing or next to nothing, it may come as some surprise to hear that I would almost always prefer to pay the full price for a Penguin Classics edition.  A big reason for this is the fascinating introductory essays and explanatory notes that they tend to come with.

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is no exception to this and, as well as a glossary of military terms and a set of notes explaining the various cultural, historical and literary references in the poems, has an excellent introductory essay by the anthology’s editor, George Walter.

In his essay, Mr Walter summarises the conventional arc of the story of the First World War, which most of the numerous anthologies of war poems follow.  First there is the patriotic, enthusiasm of the summer of 1914, during which legions of young men volunteered to fight, fondly imagining they’d be home for Christmas.  This phase is followed by the emerging horror of trench warfare, a growth in cynicism and bitterness as the war becomes a grinding war of attrition and ends with the mourning of the dead.

Mr Walter puts this down to the crystallisation of the popular image of Wilfred Owen  and, to a lesser extent, Siegfried Sassoon as symbols of the war and to the cultural imperatives of the Sixties and Seventies when many of the anthologies were published.  He disagrees with this construct and points out that, throughout the War and for many years afterwards, the overtly patriotic Rupert Brooke was much more popular and highly regarded than Owen and Sassoon and that many soldiers retained a sense of patriotism and enthusiasm for the War until its very end.

By contrast, Mr Walter groups his selection of poems into themes, which allows him largely to avoid a strictly chronological series of poems.  He also refuses to follow the conventional narrative by collecting poems that show different viewpoints of the theme in question.  He also departs from the usual run of anthologies by acknowledging that war poetry was not only the preserve of combatants but was also created by, in particular, women.  He includes a good selection of these poems, describing the impact of the War on female lives which range from the caustic to the angry to the poignant, such as May Herschel-Clark’s The Mother, an imitation of Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, which begins, “If you should die, think only this of me” and ends powerfully:

“And think, my son, with eyes grown clear and dry
She lives as though forever in your sight,
Loving the things you loved, with heart aglow
For country, honour, truth, traditions high,
- Proud that you paid their price. (And if some night
Her heart should break – well, lad, you will not know.)

Of course, as I have already implied, there are a host of First World War poetry anthologies out there and the question has to be asked: do we really need another?  Hopefully, I have already demonstrated that this anthology, taking as it does a different approach, is a welcome addition to other anthologies but there is another hurdle that The Penguin Book has to overcome.

As Mr Walter points out, most British schoolchildren are introduced to First World War poetry at school (although he notes with some asperity that, these days, it is more likely to be in a history class than an English class).  As school anthologies tend to contain a relatively consistent selection, this means that there is, if you like, a core of incredibly well-known poems – such as The Soldier, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est and I Have a Rendez-vous with Death.  This causes the would-be anthology editor a bit of a problem.  If you include all of the standards, you limit the space available for others and end up adding nothing to what has gone before.  If, on the other hand, you go for novelty and include only lesser-known poems, the anthology will feel wilfully obscure and somewhat lacking.

Mr Walter solves this conundrum with aplomb, collating a nice balance of the standard and the lesser known.  He is assisted by the fact that this anthology is substantial in length but I found a lot that was new to me, many of which were either thought-provoking or emotive.

It is interesting that the First World War remains, I believe, unique amongst conflicts in the amount, variety and quality of the poetry it generated.  I have no idea why this should be but am continually drawn to these poems.  I can’t recommend this anthology highly enough to anyone interested either in poetry in general or in the First World War.

2,499: The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

I remember being slightly stunned when I first saw my great-grandfather take off his foot and prop it up against the wall.  To my young eyes, this was a pretty cool trick to be able to pull off.  It was only later that he told me that it had been blown off during the First World War.  According to him, his commanding officer had been wounded and was lying in no-man’s land.  My great-grandfather had gone out there and had picked him up to carry him back to the British trenches when he was shot in the back and had his foot blown off.  For this, he was mentioned in despatches.

As I got older and showed more interest in history, he began to share some of his stories with me.  I am sure he gave me a sanitised version of them and, looking back, he never really talked about conditions in the trenches or the actual fighting.  In fact, as far as I can remember, he never even mentioned the names of the battles in which he fought.

And yet I confidently tell people that he was wounded in the Battle of the Somme.  I have no evidence for this and it is unlikely that I will ever have any as his military records appear to be amongst the majority of First World War army personnel records that were destroyed by German bombing in 1940.  Nevertheless, it just seems to be right to me that it was this battle that he would have been involved with.  He probably wasn’t but the received truths and symbols of that war tell me he must have been.

Geoff Dyer tells a similar story in The Missing of the Somme, a wonderfully thought-provoking meditation on the nature of remembrance and the Great War.  His family history has it that his grandfather was an underage volunteer who turned up at the recruiting office only to be told by the recruiting sergeant to go away and come back in a couple of days when he would be two years older.  This story had been faithfully passed down the generations but Dyer, having been able to find his grandfather’s records, discovered that it was completely untrue.  The image of the underage volunteer in the heady summer of 1914 has become so engrained in the collective memory of the War that we cling to it even when the facts don’t fit.

For those who haven’t come across Geoff Dyer, he is a writer who is difficult to pin down.  He is the author of a number of novels that blend fact and fiction and his non-fiction flits across whatever takes his fancy.  He claims to be inherently lazy (one of his books is entitled Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It) and The Missing of the Somme was originally meant to be a novel based on Tender is the Night).  Despite all that, his writing is enviable, especially the virtuosity with which he writes about so many different subjects.  If you haven’t tried him, I recommend you give him a go.

The Missing of the Somme takes a very tangential approach to the First World War.  It starts with the opinion (with which I am in total agreement) that it was, for Britain, the defining event of the 20^th Century and that pretty much everything else is framed by it.  Received wisdom has it that the years prior to 1914 were golden and peaceful by comparison to everything that came after, an image that conveniently ignores the class unrest, the prospects of civil war in Ireland, the strikes and the militancy of the suffragettes that were features of this period.  As Dyer points out, the darkness of the War has the effect of softening what came before.

Dyer’s focus is not actually on the War itself but on the impact it has had on later generations and, in particular, the way it has been remembered.  He looks at the way that this collective memory has been framed and fixed by literature, art, photography and even architecture.  There is a section discussing how the poetry of Wilfred Owen and the writings of Siegfried Sassoon have effectively come to dominate the way we view the War and, in doing so, he points out the incongruity of the memorials that have “Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori” inscribed on them in homage to the Glorious Dead.

Another point Dyer cleverly makes, although in a slightly forced way, is how the imagery of the War was being created almost before it was actually fought.  Every British person over the age of about seven or eight will be familiar with Lawrence Binyon’s words:

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.”

It’s a stanza that is engraved on many war memorials and is recited at almost every Remembrance Day service every year.  I find it incredibly moving despite its familiarity and, even typing it now, my eyes have clouded.  Yet the iconic phrase of remembrance was actually written in 1914, only a few weeks after war was declared and before more than a handful of soldiers had fallen.  In a sense, it was creating the framework of memory before the fact.

Amongst the history and the discussion of remembrance, Dyer weaves in snippets of a journey he made to the battlefields of northern France and Belgium with a couple of friends.  At times, these stories can seem a bit jarring, disturbing the almost languorous rhythm of the book but, towards the end, they begin to make sense as he describes his visit to the Menin Gate at Ypres.

The Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, is, along with the Somme and Gallipoli, one of the totemic events of the War for Britain.  Although the figures are disputed, the consensus would appear to be that around 260,000 casualties were taken by both the British and German sides, with a further 10,000 French casualties.  The Menin Gate is a huge memorial to the allied casualties of all the Ypres battles whose bodies have never been found.  Stood on one of the roads that led to the front lines, the local fire brigade close the road every evening at 8 p.m. and a bugler sounds the Last Post.  This ceremony has taken place every evening since 2 July 1928 save for the years of German occupation in the Second World War.  It resumed on the very day that Polish troops liberated the town.  As a schoolboy, I visited Ypres and witnessed the ceremony.  It is simple, dignified and incredibly moving.  I can’t explain how much it means that the local community still do this.

Dyer worries about whether future generations will continue to remember.  He is a decade or so older than me and wrote The Missing of the Somme in the 1990s, wondering about what would happen when the last veterans of the War were to die.  This has now happened.  No more will we see them march past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.  The living can no longer honour their contemporaries.  Dyer writes that the dead of the British Empire would take three and a half days to march past the Cenotaph.  

Personally, I believe we will continue to remember and to honour those who fought but it will take a positive effort to ensure that future generations understand the sacrifices their ancestors made.  I suspect that almost every family in Britain, France and Germany has a direct link to the War in their history and it would be a real tragedy if the losses and suffering were to be forgotten.

The Missing of the Somme is a brilliant encapsulation of thoughts about the War and its effects on Britain and, despite not being a history book or a memoir, I think it should be required reading for anyone studying the War or who is interested in it.  For those who are interested but have little time to spend with the voluminous literature on it, I would recommend a trio of short books:  Norman Stone’s World War One: A Short History, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme.

I read The Missing of the Somme for the 2012 Reading Challenge at War Through the Generations.