lo

'l'|rc l,'irsl ll'tthl ll'at

"l"htwt'1 ol'Yortllt" Kitlltitrirrt"l'yrr;rrrrorrglrl oprlirrrislic sohrr,t.irr llrc itkrrr
llrat lltc wltr wits tttitkitrg lrcrtvt'rr ir ur(,r('wlrok.sorrrt.rurtl t,lrt,crl'rrl
lllrrr.t',
;xr;rrrlitlirrg
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Al tlre llt'girrrrirrg lltt:rc wlrs r grcll flrrx of srx:iirl i<lculisrrr.'l'lrc llup
wits lo lrc st:vert:ly prrrrislrcrl for ovcrnrnrringlrlrTiiltifE"lgiurn,
ancl
l'lttrollc wlts to llc rcclcctttc<l fr<lrrr sclfislrrrcss, cuurring, and arbitrary
l'orcc, As C. l'1. M<lrrtuglrc rcrncnrbcrcci, "AIl
thc air was ringing with
rorrsirrg assrrnrnccs. li'rancc to bc savcd, Belgium righted, freedom and
civilizaliorr rcw<.rn, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies
itrul c:rrxrks arrcl rcclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature.
Wlrlt r clrancc!" At the training camps
rcill, cottstitutional lazy fellows would buy little cram-books of drill out of
tlrcir pay and sweat them up at night so as to get on the faster. Men warned
for a guard next day would agree among themselves to get up an hour
bcforc the pre-dawn winter Rev6ill6 to practice among themselves the
bcatrtifulsymbolic ritual of mounting guard in the hope of approaching the
far<1ff, longed-for ideal of smartness, the passport to France
Mrrrrtagtrc's words appear in his book significantly titled Disenchant-
rtrcrtl-published four years after the war. Those who had once been
t:rrclrantcd were now either dead, maimed, insane, or cynical. "The gen-
crouli youth of the war . . . was pretty well gone. . . .The authentic flame
, , , was as dead as the half-million of good fellows whom it had fired four
ycars ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating under so
nrilny shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and Picardy."
It had all begun in
fune
r9r4, when Archduke Francis Ferdinand,
hcir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in Sarajevo,
llosrria-Herzogovina, by , Serbian patriot fed up with Austrian domi-
rration of his country. Austria-Hungary used the occasion to pick a long-
tlcsircd quarrel with Serbia and to issue an ultimatum that could only
g:rocluce war. At this point the system of European alliances, negotiated
ovcr many decades, had to be honored: Russia came to the aid of Serbia,
whcrcupon Germany jumped
in on the side of Austria-Hungary. France
tlrcn honored her treaty with Russia, Britain hers with Franie. By Octo-
bcr r9r4, Turkey had joined
the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary
(tlrc "Central Powers"). By the end of the year the notorious trench
systcm was emplaced in Belgium and France, running
4oo
miles from its
ttrlrthern anchor at the North Sea to its southern end at the Swiss border
whilc in the east, another front developed along th. R;;;;;ft;rt^li
Arrstria-Hungary. Italy can-re in on the side of the Allies in r9r
5,
opening
it front against Austria. And in April 1917, the United States, e*as-
pcratcd by German sinking of its ihipr,'joined the Allies, although it
Iook many months for an American army to be assembled, rrppli.d,
"Nerf,r
.\n,h ltttttx,t,ttt\, ,4!i;il'tt"
3f
lr;tiltctl, slri;lPc'rl lo l,lrrro;lc, urrrl irrstullccl irr tlrc lirrc.'l'hc Anrcricans
itrrivc<l so lltlc irr tlrc war tlrat altlrouglr tlrcy forrght impressively and
wcrc gcncrally crc<litccl with supplying thc needed weight to win the
war, tlrcy strffcrccl only about one-tenth the casualties of the British, and
tllorc Artlcrican soldiers died from infuenza than from gas and bullets
ancl shclls.
Stalemate and attrition are terms inseparable from the memory of the
First World War. Because massed, quick-firing artillery and machine
guns employed by the thousands gave the defense an unprecedented
advantage, both the Allies and the Central Powers fou.,d themselves
virtual prisoners of their trenches for months on end. Indeed, from the
winter of
ryr4
until the spring of r9r8, the trench system seemed fixed,
moving now and then a few hundred yards forward or back, on great
occasions moving as much as a few miles. Theoretically it would have
been possible to walk from the North Sea beaches all the way to the Alps
entirely below ground, but actually the trench system was not absoluteiy
continuous. It was broken here and there, with mere shell holes or forti-
fied strong points serving as connecting links. A little more than half the
Allied line was occrpied by the French. The rest was British, consisting
of about 8oo battalions of some r,ooo men each. The two main concen-
trations of Allied strength were the Yp_r,es Salient in Flanders and the
Somme area in Picardy. These are the places most often recalled in these
selections.
Ideally, there were three parallel lines of trenches facing the enemy,
with the front-line trench fifty yards to a mile or so from its hostiie
counterpart across the way. Several yards behind the front-line trench
was the support trench, and several yards behind that the reserve. These
were "firing"
trenches, connected by communication trenches running
perpendicular. "Saps,"
shallower trenches, ran out into No Man's Land,
giving access to forward observation and listening posts, as well as gre-
nade ("bomb") throwing positions and machi"e gu" nests. cominfup
to the trenches from the rear, you might walk in a communication
trench a mile or more long. It often began in a town and gradually
deepened, and by the time it reached the reserve trench it would bL
eight feet deep. Into the sides of the trenches were dug "funk holes,"
where one or two men would crouch when shelling became particulariy
he:tur. There were also deep dugouts, reached by crude stairways, used as
officers' quarters and command posts. The floor of a well-constructed
trench was covered with wooden duckboards because the bottom of a
trench was usually wet and the walls, always crumbling, had to be rein-
forced by sandbags, corrugated iron, or bundles of reeds. A trench was
protected on the enemy side by copious entanglements of barbed wire,
placed far enough out to prevent the enemy's crawling up to grenade-
throwing range. The normal way of using the trench.r *r, for a unit to
1iru
Alp,,ta,. &r&egillp
A"&
7a,*
hsseu
/il;+n^
h,W
.
N"rl-rYt
"Never
Such Innocence
Agairr"
Although many of its usages now seem archaic to the point of quaint-
ness, the First World War (called
the Great War or simply The War
until the outbreak of the Second necessitated a name-charlge) remains
the prototype of modern wors; For one thing, it killed and wounded a
great'many people, over
)7
million of them, in fact, more than three
times the population of the state of Pennsylvania. It was also the first to
make significant use of machine guns, and by the tens of thousands, as
well as to feature barf,ed wire, steel helmets, tanks and famethrowers,
poison gas and gas masks, and fighter planes'and aerial bombardment
(r,4t3 people were killed in Zeppelin raids over England), and it was the
first war to use the telephone to convey reports from the front lines to
the rear and orders from the rear to the front, making possible the very
"modern"
assuinption-i.e., skeptical and adversarial-that the staff
doesn't know what's going on. This war also established unevadable
conscription as the national means for waging war with mass armies,
thus providing civilians with a novel insight, formerly limited to the
military, into the experience of socially sanctioned murder. The result .
was
a
literature of shock and outrage, a product of horror impfi*giiig on
optimism and innocence.
"Never
such innocence again," writes Philip Larkin. He is thinking of
the rush to the British recruiting stations in August 19r4. England had
not been in a maior war for.a century, and people were unaware of the
potential effects of industrialism on an a"-cjivity conceived largely in
terms of cavalry, chivalry, and "honor."
Most British and French ex-
pected the war to be over by Christmas 1914, and the men in the
training camps were anxious to do their bit with enthusiasm and "pep."
The novelty of escaping offices and classrooms for tents in the field and a
boyish life of athleticism and good fellowship was a heady experience,
and as Rupert Brooke stressed in his farnous sonnet "Peace,"
at the
outset the war seemed to offer an invigorating fight from a tired, cynical
society. "l
adore war," wrote the young poet
fulian
Grenfell. "It's like a
big picnic. . . . I've never been so well or hrppy." He went on to write
about "ioy of battle," but in r9r5 he was killed at Ypres. In her poem
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40
R. A. Scott Macfie
HT]GH MACDIARMID
7Bg2-7978
irr"p*11rid, pen-name
of the scottish nationalist, Marxist, and Anglo-
phobe
Christopher M. Grieve, took up Housman's
challenge.
ANoruBn EprrnpH oN aN Anuy oF MencuNARrES
It is a God-dr*ned lie to say that these
'
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man,s pride.
They were professional
murderers
and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
-
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist
here and there on earth.
R. A.
SCOTT MACFIE
1868-?
Macfre was in his mid-forties when he served in France with the Liver-
poo!Scottish
Regiment, winning the Military Medal and rising to the
rank of Regimental
Quartermaster
Sergeant.
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This
k No Case of
petty
R,?ht or Wrong
r47
EDINTARD
THOMAS
1B7B-
1917
Born
in London
and educated
at oxford,
Thomas
was an unhappy
re_
viewer
and miscellaneous
writer
,"tI grfu;;;;';;
r' reading
of the earry
poems
of Robert
Frost
whose
u"r ir piir"nTri
p*ti",,
rhetoric
he
found "revolutionary,'i
and in hrb i*n po"*,
he triei to equar
their carm
surfaces.
Only
stx of his por-i
*rr" published
tiire
he was killed
on
the Western
Front.
IN MrrvroRrAM
(Easrnn,(
r9r
5)
The fowers
left thick at nightfall
in the wood
This Eastertide
call into
*Ind tf,. *.r,
Now far from home,
who, with tf,." sweethearts,
should
Have gathered
them
and will do ,.u.,
agrir.
!v' v"vr
Tnrs
Is No Case
or
perry
Rrcnr
on WnoNc
This is no case of petty
right
or wrong
That politicians
oi philosJphers
_Qy
igdge.
I hate_not
Germans,
nor grow
hot
With Iove of Englishmel,
to pl.rr.
newspapers.
p9s1de my hate for one fri pririot
My hatred
of the Kaiser
is love true:_
I
kil9
of god
he is, banging,
gong.
But I have not to choosJb"ir.L
fh" tro,
Or.between
iustice
and injustice-
Dinned
With
war and argument
I read no more
Than
in the storm smoking
rlo"g the wind
Athwart
the wood.
fuLw,tgb.r,
*uldrons
roa;;
144
I
Eric Hiscock
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
-
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix
broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what .,er.r slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good
and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.
A Pnrvarn
This ploughman
dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frozen night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
"At
Mrs. Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,', said he,
"I
slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond "The
Drover," a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France-that,
too, he secret keeps.
ERIC HISCOCK
1900-tg}6
Hiscock was a schoolboy in oxford and an assistant in the Bodleian
Library there when, underage, he managed to
ioin
the Royal Fusiliers,
a_nd by the spring of tgtS he was fghting near
ypres.
Aftir the war he
became a
iournalist
on tlte Evening standard, where he specialized in
book news. More than a half-centuryafter
the war, in tg76,-he published
Th
xilm,
At&
ni&t
ri&t
emd
cilld
iog in
m:-
dme-
the o
[xrE
@
ndn
antl
uet rl
srsPi
rmdcr
bc ir
m, I
ea.L (
ftct
tim d
bhDL
ciily r
Jiln
t
P[d
Ch
adEcp
tu$a
s.{
Itsh&
trcU
llre
c&
mfr
frol r
Gocry
The Bells of Flell Go Ting-aling-aling
fi)
surely
ninen-
target,
r earth
emble
llarke
rlness.
hen a
lhe air
lheart
wer to
teland
; mov-
nasl
llevel.
s over
Pace-
years'
today
6t the
nds of
r sight
a few
there
ly the
ver he
dn't a
down
called
ryeted
r keep
ing on
: until
had a
r such
more
avid for conquest than ever. Brook,
/ackson
and myself all had some
homosexual
tendencies (despite
/acko's
infatuation
with hi, Cioydo"
belle) and in the days and nights of stress we masturbated,
but kisses on
unshaved faces were rare, and then only in moments of acute dr,g.,
When we were sent off on the prisoner-getting
raid from the
..Bellevle,,
trench in-the Ypres salient Brook kissed me a fond farewell
.nd hof.d
we'd get
back safely.
|ackson,
seeing such endearments
taking plr".
L,
the duckboards
covering the ghastly evil-smelling mud that wal o.r, t.*-
p-orary High street, would grimace
and say: "Blimey,
you blokes. I can,t
think why you don't get married," but his arms *ouid encircle both of us
with all the energy of an Arsenal half-back who had watched his friend
on the outsideleft score a goal that might take the team to wembley.
Trench warfare bred a ,monasticism
not unlike which was lived at
Eton (ol
lny
other Public school) and in oxford and cambridge
*rr.r.
susceptible undergradyates yearned for favours from choirboyl
singing
Hear My Proyer with all the passion
of a spring morning thrusir gr..Ii"g
an early worm. Many a soldier died and *r, *ourned by his fell"ow mei
with even more intensity
than by some bereft wife at ho*e in n"gh"j.
But the Lieutenant
clarkes were a wholly different cup of tea.;fhev
were destroyers, devoid of the feelings that, probably,
icept th. b;;;
boys of Arthur's Round-Table
togethir. No wonde, such p.ople
"f;; come to a dramatic end. Not unlike the parson I knew whq foreve,
pursuing
the sordid impossible,
ended up wiih his penis
cut off and stuck
on his nose in some dank alley within the environi of his own oari
VTLFRED
OVEN
1893-1918
Owen was a lieutenant in the Manchester Regtment whose literary ca-
reer was encouraged
by siegfried sassoon. A week before the Armiitice,
this sensitive, shy, affectionate creature, already the winner of the Mit;-
tary cross, was leading his men in an attack on the western Front when
he was machine-gunned
to death.
A<
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Robert C. Hoffman
Shall they return to beating of great bells
,
r,{
*fnP*
In wild trainloads?
I
1.-
A few, a few, too few for drums
and yells,
I ..
1""
May creep back, silent, to village wells,
\
Itr
chase
Singir
In
what
when
myp
alrear
the 6
lu
natio
pital
the f
won(
were
gian.
rior <
TI
were
serio
ward
woul
man
jass
thro
brair
orge
stan
F
the'
of tl
se1-e
\\-[r
doe
fron
hear
hau
T
four
sore
bac
u'ht
stei
Thr
Up half-known roads.
T C. HOFFMAN
7Bg7-DBs
Hoffman fought in France as a nineteen-year-old
infantry sergeant in the
U.S. zSth Division. Wounded several times, he sutvived to become a
champion
weightlifter and physical-cultute entrepreneur,
an executive
of thi York
(Pennsylvania) Bar Bell Co., and the publisher of the maga-
zine Strength and Health, as well as the author of books like Big Arms:
How To D.relop Them and How To Be Strong, Healthy, and Happy.
In t94o he wrote I Remember the Last War to caution against Ameri-
can involvement
in another one.
From I RevrervtBER THE Last Wan
The ward of the hospital I was in was a huge affair with row after row of
iron beds filled with wounded. I believe there must have been five hun-
dred wounded
in the huge room in which I was placed. It is doubtful if
this building was originafly a hospital; it had been pressed into service for
that purpor-.. fn. ,ong
'tMrdeltn" was popular at this time and a boy
abori fourteen came diily to sing for us. He thought that he was doing
his bit to cheer us uP. At the age of puberty which he was passing
through, any boy will have far from an attractive voice-an occasional
n.r, 6rrr, aiternating
with a high falsetto, and all degrees of tones in
between. But this young fellow had a particularly terrible voice aside
from going through the period of changing voices-a
piercing, penetrat-
ing, ,Ispiig voice which would have done credit to an east side fish-
monger.