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Classic memoirs and fiction based on personal experience
can be highly informative and atmospheric, although
they are sometimes open to challenge by historians
over details of fact. Among the classic authors of
the Great War whose work is still in print, look for:
Edmund Blunden, Understones
of War
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
A. P. Herbert, The Secret Battle
Frederik Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune
Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
These veterans of the war give a powerful impression
of what they saw and lived through in the landscape
of the Somme.
Poets and artists have left their own interpretation
of what the war felt like for them. Look for work
by some of these interpreters of war – there
are many anthologies of First World War poetry,
while paintings of the war can be seen in galleries
and museums – particularly the Imperial War
Museum in London. Books of all kinds about the war
are frequently illustrated by the work of war artists
both official and unofficial.
These are a few of the writers and artists whose
work reflects their war-time experience in the Somme,
with some website links to follow up. In many cases
it is possible to study their work and then explore
the sites of their war activity; visits of this
kind help to understand this element of their creativity
and often illuminate their other later work. The
Alliance of Literary Societies www.snc.demon.co.uk
is a good source of information on organisations
devoted to specific writers:
Edmund Blunden
George Butterworth
George Clausen
Robert Graves (www.robertgraves.org)
Ivor Gurney
A. P. Herbert
David Jones
Paul Nash
C. R. W. Nevinson
William Orpen
Wilfred Owen (www.1914-1918.co.uk)
Isaac Rosenberg
John Singer Sargent
Siegfried Sassoon (www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/sassoonsocy.htm)
Will Streets
Information, comment and articles about many poets
of the First World War can be found on the website
of the War Poets Association, www.warpoets.org
Poets of the Second World War era recognised the
great influence of the older generation who fought
through the previous conflict. When questioned about
the apparent lack of poetry in the Second World
War, one of the best-known among them, Keith Douglas,
remarked that, ‘Hell cannot be let loose again’
– the shattering conditions and break in continuity
of 1914-1918 meant that the poetry of warfare could
never be the same again.
For illustrations of French art, and bibliography
on writers and artists, have a look at http://dessins1418.free.fr
Among those who died in the Somme were the composer
George Butterworth and the writer ‘Saki’
(H.H.Munro). Both names appear on the Thiepval Memorial.
The young officer Noel Hodgson is buried in the
Devonshire Cemetery near Fricourt, in a line of
graves occupying the trench from which they launched
a doomed attack on 1 July 1916. His poem ‘Before
Action’ was published a few days before he
was killed.
Here again, local publications or newspaper archives
in Britain may yield poetry or art created by men
from locally-based military units. For the Pals’
Battalions, look at sites such as www.leedspals.co.uk
, www.eebo.freeserve.co.uk
, www.themanchesters1914-18.co.uk
, www.pals.org.uk
They will have information about the Pals unit –
its volunteers and their lives before enlisting,
their training, their initial period in France and
what happened to them in July 1916 in the Battle
of the Somme; and also about the memorials set up
in their memory along the old front line.
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French
and German writers and artists also recorded
their wartime experiences; they include
Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Duhamel
(a doctor, he cared for many victims of
battles in the Somme), Dorgelès,
Céline, Genevoix, Blaise Cendrars,
Ernst Jünger (who took part in the
Battle of the Somme), Otto Dix, Gerrit
Engelke, Erich Remarque and many more.
The American poet Alan
Seeger (“I have
a rendezvous with death”) was
killed in July 1916 while serving with
the French Foreign Legion in the Santerre,
the broad agricultural area south of
the River Somme.
Georges
Duhamel
Georges Duhamel was born in Paris in
1884. When war was declared, he had
been a practicing surgeon for four years,
often in very difficult circumstances.
His career took him from the capital
to the front in Champagne, to Verdun,
in the Somme in 1916 and 1917, and then
back again to Champagne. He wrote two
stories based on these experiences with
which he achieved immediate fame: Civilisation
and The New Book of Martyrs.
Blaise
Cendrars
Frédéric Sauser, better
known as Blaise Cendrars, was born in
1887 at Chaud-de-Fonds in Switzerland.
Very soon he was, together with his
friend Guillaume Apollinaire, one of
the originators of modern poetry in
search of pathos. On 29 July 1914, he
signed up with the Foreign Legion after
having written to his friends: "this
war is the painful delivery of the birth
of freedom". After many difficulties,
he proceeded on foot with his regiment
to the front in the Somme where, as
everywhere along the western front,
a lengthy period of trench warfare had
begun. From December to February 1915,
he was stationed in the line at Frise
(at Grenouillère and the Bois
de la Vache) where he went into battle
together with his comrades in arms -
an experience he described in his well-known
works " La main coupée "
(The severed hand) and "J'ai tué
" (I have killed): "At
Bois de la Vache, at Corne au Bois,
we were holding our position which was
separated from the German position only
by a few sandbags. It would easily have
been possible to impale oneself from
our trench on a bayonet in the other
trench ".
Still in the Somme, he later moved on
to the trenches of Herbécourt.
His regiment was finally moved to the
front at Artois, to the north of Arras,
at Souchez, and specifically to the
Vimy ridge. He returned to the Somme
in early May, to Tilloloy.
It was during one of the bloody battles
in Champagne (September 1915) that Blaise
lost his right arm at Navarin, near
to Souain, on 28 September. He was invalided
out of the army and until his death
in 1961, he concentrated on writing
– his works a literary epic of
the modern adventurer.
Ernst
Jünger
Born on 29 March 1895 at Heidelberg
in Germany, Ernst Jünger joined
up as a volunteer in 1914. He fought
at the front in Champagne where he was
wounded seven times. On 22 September
1918 he was awarded the highest military
distinction, the Order of Merit. From
his experience during the fighting,
he gained much philosophical and fundamental
political insight which formed the basis
for his works: Orage d'acier
(Storm of Steele) in which he relates
his war experiences, Le Boqueteau
(Copse 125) (1924), Feu et sang
(Feuer und Blut) (1925). In 1927, Jünger
went to live in Berlin where he wrote
for the main nationalist revolutionary
magazines.
Siegfried
Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon is one of the most
well-known British poets of the First
World War. He joined up as soon as the
war started and arrived in France in
1915. He took part in the Battle of
the Somme about which he left many striking
descriptions both in prose and in poetry.
After the armistice, he continued to
pass on his experience of war, but now
in novels and autobiographies. Following
the example of his works of poetry,
his novels present a moving and very
detailed picture of life in the front
line in the trenches and in the officers’
quarters.
Wilfred
Owen
Born at Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, Shropshire,
on 18 March 1893. In 1915, he enlisted
in the army, and served as company commander.
In 1916 he was sent to France with the
Manchester regiment, and in 1917 he
spent five months in a military hospital
in Scotland. After several months serving
in England, he was once again posted
to France. It was the war that allowed
his talent to develop, so much so that
he made the point during the final days
of 1917 in a letter to his mother: "My
dear mother, the end of this year sees
me as a poet, which is not how I started
the year. The Georgians – [a group
of British lyrical poets in the early
twentieth century] – consider
me to be their peer; I am a poet’s
poet. I am started." In October
1918, Wilfred Owen was awarded the Military
Cross. He died on the banks of the Sambre
– Oise canal on 4 November 1918,
one week before the end of the war.
He was buried in the communal cemetery
in Ors.
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A very wide range of music connects
the modern mind to the First World War: there are
the songs made famous by the soldiers as they marched
along the interminable roads of Flanders and Northern
France, such as ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’,
‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘The
Roses of Picardy’, ‘Mademoiselle from
Armentières’ and many popular hymn tunes
with soldiers’ own words – generally insulting
and/or humorous.
This kind of song reached a later audience in the
1960s with the production of an anti-war musical play
(later film), ‘Oh What a Lovely War’,
which used the comments and contributions of many
veteran soldiers to recreate the unprinted (and often
unprintable) invented versions.
Music written in the post-war years included many
elegies for the dead of the war, the loss of innocence
that the war represented, and personal loss. Sir Arthur
Bliss, whose ‘The Lark Ascending’ came
to be firmly linked with memories of the skylarks
of the Somme fields fluttering and singing in the
midst of battle, wrote ‘Morning Heroes’
in memory of his brother, killed in action.
The poets of the war provided material for song settings,
a practice which continues into the 21st century (The
poetry of Ivor Gurney, himself originally a musician
who composed musical song settings for other poets’
work, came to wide public notice long after his death
in 1937). In the 1960s, Benjamin Britten created a
stir in musical circles with his ‘War Requiem’
which used poems by Wilfred Owen in his setting of
the traditional requiem Mass. This great work, which
thus relates directly to the First World War, was
first performed in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral
when it reached completion after destruction in the
Second World War.
For British visitors, perhaps the most evocative
and universally recognised music in the context
of the Somme comes from bagpipes or bugles. Bagpipes,
the stirring open-air sound of Scotland, are often
heard at commemorative gatherings – there
is even a French pipe band, whose members wear Scottish
regimental uniforms. And at official occasions,
as at military funerals, a single bugler sounds
the ‘Last Post’. It is frequently sounded
in conjunction with a formal silence of one or two
minutes.
Both instruments are audible over long distances,
and in the peaceful fields of the modern Somme they
are one of our most instantly recognisable reminders
of past warfare.
At both official and unofficial British ceremonies,
in Britain and France alike, one verse in particular
has come to be used to remember the dead of the
war. This is part of Lawrence Binyon’s poem
‘For the Fallen’, which he wrote, prophetically,
in the earliest weeks of the war. Today most of
the poem is neglected, but these four lines have
become a kind of secular prayer ;
They shall grow not old, as
we that are left grow old :
Age shall not wither them nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
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