On the Wire

A left click on the cover of this first
edition of Rhymes of a Red Cross Man
will take you to the complete collection.

Last Sunday the Cantata Singers of Ottawa presented the premiere of a work written by conductor/composer Christopher Hossfeld in commemoration of the centenary of the beginning of the First Great War. As the text for his In Pace Hossfeld choose On the Wire  a poem by Robert Service from his Rhymes of A Red Cross Man.  Woven between the stanzas of this verse (a term Service used for his work which he did not regard as poems) were the various Lenten versicles, responsory and prayers from the Office of Compline,  The contrast between Service's harrowing cry of a wounded young soldier caught on the barbed wire at the Front and the liturgy's quiet reassurance of untroubled sleep,  and the final choral chant In pace, in idispsum dormiam et requiescam* alternating with an early music wind ensemble was both unsettling and immensely moving.  It's a work I hope to hear again as I, personally, found it a very emotional experience.

But as often happens it went beyond being a musical experience and led me to investigate something that was new to me:  the War verses of Robert W. Service, the British-Canadian poet.  I would think that most people who know of Service today think in terms of his two best known works from Songs of a Sourdough:  The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee.  That first book of verse proved to be his serendipitous road to fame and fortune.  Between 1907 and 1912 he wrote three books of verse based on life in the Yukon and the Gold Rush.  In 1912 he moved to Paris and after the outbreak of war the 41-year old Service attempted to enlist but was turned down.  In 1916, after a brief stint as a war correspondent for the Toronto Star,  he became a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver for the American Red Cross.  During a period in convalescent hospital he wrote his next book of verse and dedicated it to his brother Lieutenant Albert Service who had been killed in august of that year.   Rhymes of A Red Cross Man is unlike any of the Great War poetry I had read previously - even in their bitterness Graves, Sassoon, Owen et al had a certain elegance, I might even say romantic tone, that is foreign to Service.  There are verses that are boldly satirical as well as many that have a stark brutality about them that hide nothing of the horror that he saw or was told about by those around him.  Many seem to start off rather light-heartedly like The Little Piou-Piou but turn deadly serious; others such as A Song of Winter Weather reflect the obstacles the ordinary soldier faced beyond the enemy.  Over the Parapet takes a wry little twist right at the end with an audacity that is typically Service and  Afternoon Tea takes the mickey out of officers and the leaders who led some many men to the slaughter. 

On the Wire

O God, take the sun from the sky!
It's burning me, scorching me up.
God, can't You hear my cry?
'Water! A poor, little cup!'
It's laughing, the cursed sun!
See how it swells and swells
Fierce as a hundred hells!
God, will it never have done?
It's searing the flesh on my bones;
It's beating with hammers red
My eyeballs into my head;
It's parching my very moans.
See! It's the size of the sky,
And the sky is a torrent of fire,
Foaming on me as I lie
Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Of the thousands that wheeze and hum
Heedlessly over my head,
Why can't a bullet come,
Pierce to my brain instead,
Blacken forever my brain,
Finish forever my pain?
Here in the hellish glare
Why must I suffer so?
Is it God doesn't care?
Is it God doesn't know?
Oh, to be killed outright,
Clean in the clash of the fight!
That is a golden death,
That is a boon; but this . . .
Drawing an anguished breath
Under a hot abyss,
Under a stooping sky
Of seething, sulphurous fire,
Scorching me up as I lie
Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Hasten, O God, Thy night!
Hide from my eyes the sight
Of the body I stare and see
Shattered so hideously.
I can't believe that it's mine.
My body was white and sweet,
Flawless and fair and fine,
Shapely from head to feet;
Oh no, I can never be
The thing of horror I see
Under the rifle fire,
Trussed on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Of night and of death I dream;
Night that will bring me peace,
Coolness and starry gleam,
Stillness and death's release:
Ages and ages have passed,—
Lo! it is night at last.
Night! but the guns roar out.
Night! but the hosts attack.
Red and yellow and black
Geysers of doom upspout.
Silver and green and red
Star-shells hover and spread.
Yonder off to the right
Fiercely kindles the fight;
Roaring near and more near,
Thundering now in my ear;
Close to me, close . . . Oh, hark!
Someone moans in the dark.
I hear, but I cannot see,
I hear as the rest retire,
Someone is caught like me,
Caught on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Again the shuddering dawn,
Weird and wicked and wan;
Again, and I've not yet gone.
The man whom I heard is dead.
Now I can understand:
A bullet hole in his head,
A pistol gripped in his hand.
Well, he knew what to do,—
Yes, and now I know too. . . .

Hark the resentful guns!
Oh, how thankful am I
To think my beloved ones
Will never know how I die!
I've suffered more than my share;
I'm shattered beyond repair;
I've fought like a man the fight,
And now I demand the right
(God! how his fingers cling!)
To do without shame this thing.
Good! there's a bullet still;
Now I'm ready to fire;
Blame me, God, if You will,
Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Service was honoured with medals for his service during the war: the 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and the Victory Medal. It is interesting, if not a surprise, that, like Vera Brittain's, his is a name that is missing from the memorial to poets of the Great War in Westminster Abbey.  Though popular with the public his book was less so with the government and military of the time.

And Service ends his verses with a stanza that perhaps sums up his view of that Great War to end all Wars:

Oh spacious days of glory and of grieving!
Oh sounding hours of lustre and of loss!
Let us be glad we lived you, still believing
The God who gave the cannon gave the Cross.
Let us be sure amid these seething passions,
The lusts of blood and hate our souls abhor:
The Power that Order out of Chaos fashions
Smites fiercest in the wrath-red forge of War. . . .
Have faith! Fight on! Amid the battle-hell
Love triumphs, Freedom beacons, all is well.

L'Envoi**

* In peace and into the same I shall sleep and rest.
 

**Envoi: the usually explanatory or commendatory concluding remarks to a poem, essay, or book; especially :  a short final stanza of a ballad serving as a summary or dedication.


Previous Posts on Poetry and War:
                          Poems of War and Loss
                          The Poetry of War

November 7 - 1919: The first Palmer Raid is conducted on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists are arrested in 23 different U.S. cities.

Poems of War and Loss

Its difficult to know if Downton Abbey revived an interest in things Edwardian and British or the interest in things Edwardian and British spawned the popular TV series.  But we are once again - as were were in the late 70s-early 80s with Upstairs Downstairs and Duchess of Duke Street -  in the throws of a love affair with the British Upper class, their servants and life before the Great War.

Not owning a TV I have only seen the first season on iTunes so I'm not sure how or when World War One will be handled on the BBC series.  There has been a tradition - which began with the war itself - of painting a rather romantic picture of "the war to end war".  We know now,  as many did then, that there was nothing romantic about the trenches, the gas, the disease, the destruction and the bodies that were the battlefields of 1914-1918.   As in all wars the media published what the governments of the time wanted people to know: casualty figures that were acceptable but less than accurate; successes were emphasised ignoring the minimal gains made and cost of life to achieve them.  The trains overflowing with eager - and as the war progressed younger - men headed for the front left Victoria Station in the bright glare of the sun, those returning with the maimed and wounded in body and soul crept into the station under the darkness of night.  The public need only see the glories of war - singers, performers, painters, writers, composers, poets, all were enlisted to keep the fight for King and Country on the boil.  And many of them did and they cannot be blamed for doing so - the truth of the misery of the front was not something that would inspire victory.  But from the front itself came the voices that showed the open wounds that would never heal.  The poets of the battlefield

Even when I was learning history - Canada having none to speak of any significance according to the curriculum of the 1950s so we still relived the glories of the Empire - the romance of the war was still firmly in place.  I recall being told that  A. J. P. Taylor's The First World War was an unreliable source and wasn't permitted to use it in an essay I was writing.  Though in literature class we were told that there were war poets such as Wilfred Owen the only work we read was his poem which begins "Move him into the sun".  It was not until I was looking it up yesterday that I knew that he called this fruitless appeal to the sun to warm the body of a dead soldier "Futility".  Nor were we told that it was the least representative of his poems.  Perhaps we were too close to the end of another war that was going to end war and was fought for the glory of a fading Empire to be allowed to gaze on the horror of that earlier conflict.

Had we been allowed to read more of Owen or Siegfried Sassoon or Robert Graves,  we would have seen  the pain and bitterness - and awareness - that these incredible soldier-poets recorded in their notebooks as they crouched in their trenches or sat in their tents listening to the whizzbangs and waiting for the sirens that told them to don their gas masks.

Most of Owen's poetry had none of the gentle melancholy of Futility;  much was an indictment of the people who had brought them to those foreign fields that were to be planted with their bodies and become "forever England" or Australia or Canada or New Zealand.  Rupert Brooke's poem made it all seem romantic and patriotic - Owen's poems took a colder look at the men who had sent so many young men to die.

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and strops,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

From The First World War Poetry Digital Archive

University of Oxford© [Copyright notice]

In surfing - if that can be considered the word for going through the pages of University of Oxford's digital archive of First World Ward Poetry I came across the name of Vera Brittain - an author and poet unknown to me.  Her story is a fascinating one of repeated loss of those she loved during that First Great War. They were loses that were to remain with her all her life and also the inspiration for much of what she wrote.

In 1915 she left Oxford to become a VAD (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurse; in 1916 while stationed on the hospital ship HMHS Britannic at Mudros Bay, Lemnos - a small but strategic island in the Aegean - she saw the graves of three Canadian nursing sister who had died at the hospital camp there.  Inspired by their unsung struggle to tend the wounded and dying she wrote a poem that begins in a romantic vein but that for all its slight floweriness does nothing to hide the brutal edge of truth.
Brittain also worked in the prisoner of war hospitals tending the dreaded and dreadful Hun - and her words in The German Ward, though perhaps thought by many to be verging on the traitorous, cry that suffering was not the fate of only one side. 

THE SISTERS BURIED AT LEMNOS

O Golden Isle set in the deep blue Ocean,
With purple shadows flitting o'er thy crest,
I kneel to thee in reverent devotion
Of some who on thy bosom lie at rest!

Seldom they enter into song or story;
Poets praise the soldier's might and deeds of War,
But few exalt the Sisters, and the glory
Of women dead beneath a distant star.

No armies threatened in that lonely station,
They fought not fire or steel or ruthless foe,
But heat and hunger, sickness and privation,
And Winter's deathly chill and blinding snow.

Till mortal frailty could endure no longer
Disease's ravages and climate's power,
In body weak, but spirit ever stronger,
Courageously they stayed to meet their hour.

No blazing tribute through the wide world flying,
No rich reward of sacrifice they craved,
The only meed of their victorious dying
Lives in the heart of humble men they saved.

Who when in light the Final Dawn is breaking,
Still faithful, though the world's regard may cease,
Will honour, splendid in triumphant waking,
The souls of women, lonely here at peace.

O golden Isle with purple shadows falling
Across thy rocky shore and sapphire sea,
I shall not picture these without recalling
The sisters sleeping on the heart of thee!

From The First World War Poetry Digital Archive

University of Oxford© [Copyright notice]

Sadly the name of Vera Brittain is missing from this stone commemorating 16 World War I poets
in Westminster Abbey.  The quote is from Wilfred Owen's proposed preface to his poems. 

"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

20 November - 1947: The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten,  at Westminster Abbey in London.