Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God.

Revd Rachel Mann sets the scene for a powerful exploration of the impact of the First World War on her family as well as the faith and the myths of the British Isles…

My mum and I are driving into Worcester. It is the week after Christmas and it’s one of those grey low-ceiling days on which crows seem to caw-caw for the end of the world. We are on the old 449 road driving past 1930s semis and shops for paint and bric-a-brac and we have settled into an amicable silence. And then on the right I see a park, a tiny park of grass and stripped ash, announcing itself from a brick entrance with sculpted wreaths as ‘Gheluvelt Park’ and I am cast back into one of those endless puzzles of my childhood. For in spotting the name I am, momentarily, my eight-year-old self again clicked safely into the back of my parents’ Vauxhall Chevette on our way to visit my dad’s aunts. And I’m puzzling out how to say this peculiar word ‘Gheluvelt’ (Helluvell, Gelluvult, Gulluvelt) and what on earth it has to do with Worcester.

Yet even at eight I connect the word with my grandfathers, one of whom, Sam, has already been dead for four years. Grandad Sam – who brought us packets of sweets and carried great bags of sadness under his eyes. Grandad Sam, my dad’s dad, the twinkling man who years later I discover had beaten the shit out of my granny when he got pissed or just couldn’t hide the memories of the war, the Great War, the war that took him outside his beloved country for the only time in his life. So, now, Mum and I are passing Gheluvelt Park again and I remember that my intuitive connection of it at eight with my grandfathers was not so very far out. For, both Grandad Sam and Bert were soldiers of the Great War and, as I discovered in my teens, Gheluvelt Park was one of those small grassy memorial spaces that were carved out of its silence. (Gheluvelt being one of those now forgotten butchering places of the Ypres Salient where, in 1914, the Worcestershire Regiment fought.)

The Great War represents a crisis in my family history. By this, I mean that it represents the point at which my family took part in History for the first time. Before the war my family’s only mark on public space lay in the pages of parish registers when they were ‘hatched, matched and despatched’ along with the rest of the rural poor. When the war began my grandfathers were swept up into another life. They received army numbers, joined regiments, got wounded and, ultimately, received medals.1 What had been generations of agricultural existence were for the first time questioned, if not yet broken. Questioned, but not broken for, as both Bert and Sam discovered, life in the army was the continuation of agricultural labour by other means; they had as Ronald Blythe puts it, ‘fled the wretchedness of the land in 1914’2 only to discover an intensification of it in Flanders and Picardy. For, if it wasn’t handling horses it was digging. They were yeomen made the makers of what Paul Fussell calls the Troglodyte World, burying bodies and the remains of bodies, digging deeper so as to make safer places or better places for killing. Digging and redigging the same damn piece of waterlogged land night after night. It’s hard not to believe, despite the grimness of life on the land in 1914, that as Sam and Bert crouched in trenches they didn’t sometimes think longingly of the days before the war. A time when a long day in the fields at least offered the promise of cider and sleep for weary bones rather than the threat of death.3 Grandad Sam was also a horseman. Indeed, one strand of the family – being short of stature and lightweight – successfully went in for jockeying on the race tracks of France and England. And this understanding of horses got Sam out of the trenches into another life – as trooper in the Worcestershire Yeomanry in Allenby’s desert campaign and batman to the 4th Baron Hampton.

Grandad Bert (my mum’s dad) was a private in the Worcestershire regiment and, later, after being seriously wounded, in the Labour Corps.4 I only knew him as an exceptionally quiet old man who loved Saturday afternoon wrestling – Giant Haystacks versus Big Daddy versus Catweazle versus Kendo Nagasaki – and watching snooker on black and white TV. His natural habitat always seemed to be outdoors and his whole life – apart from some time working at the local RAF base – was orientated around the land, primarily as a farm labourer. If he had ever been a dreamer or a man of words I do not know. It only seemed to me that his past had silenced him.

Ronald Blythe is right. In 1914, agricultural conditions were harsh. They were perhaps closer to the bleak narratives of Hardy than the pastoral idylls conjured by Vaughan Williams at his most expressive. If George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad song cycle beautifully evokes the shires and a world about to disappear in the carnage of war,5 it is a romantic evocation. Granny Collins told a story that reminds us not to be sentimental about the Victorian and Edwardian eras. As a little girl, before the war, one of her jobs in her Worcestershire village was to ring the bell for funerals. She’d often be dragged out of school to do it. One day, as she tolled the bell, she saw her father enter the church carrying a tiny coffin. Puzzled, she realised it was her infant sister. It was the first she knew about her death.

In the days before mechanisation of the Land and in conditions of low wages, the army would certainly have provided promises of escape for someone like young Albert and his brother Tom (who was killed on the Mesopotamian Front). For over a hundred years before the Great War, the countryside had been haemorrhaging people. From 1881, 700,000 British agricultural workers and their families, helped by the new National Union of Agricultural Workers, emigrated to the colonies. Two and half million acres of arable land became grass between 1872 and 1900 and the invention of devices like the binder meant that fewer labourers were needed. Equally, the promise of the city and the town, the dream of weaving riches and a better life in the looms of Kidderminster or Manchester or Oldham had emptied the land. The situation presented to those who remained was no romantic idyll. Steven Spielberg’s glossy picture of 1914 rural Devon in the early sections of his film adaptation of War Horse is hardly faithful to reality. Long hours of work with few comforts and little security and even less entertainment were the norm. If life at the Manor House was good, life in the Cottage held few delights and typically offered only wearied bones.

I have met people who have within them a seemingly inexhaustible stillness. Among them I count assorted holy people, those who have accepted they are about to die and others who are not enamoured with the glamour of this world. I have also known people who have an extraordinary facility with silence, an aspect of character I find both rarer and more impressive as our world becomes noisier. Grandad Bert was not a man for stillness. He was at ease with a hoe in his hand, working out the rural choreography of centuries in the easy movements of his body and tools. And yet, from the point of view of a small child, it was as if his short, plump frame and his loose jowls gathered silence to itself. Even when his wife, Doll, aka Granny Collins, was still alive, it seemed to me that he had nothing to say. Granny had all the words, was full of stories and rumours and gossip. His silence said more than all of her remarkable words. But if I remember granny’s love and silly stories, and the way she would paint kitchen cupboards bright orange, it is Bert who haunts me now. Perhaps because I remember him speaking only once.

As a small child I became fascinated by war, read endless tales about derring-do. I loved magazines like The Victor and made models of WW1 and WW2 aeroplanes. I knew grandad had fought in the Great War and yet I knew it was something we did not, as a family, talk about. Or if we did, we did not do so in his company. Yet I remember once asking him about his experience in the war. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t seem angry. He spoke quietly about being wounded on the Somme. I was excited. I’d heard of this place. I’d read about it in magazines and books. It made me think of heroes and courage and glory. I asked where else he’d fought, with the childish and insensitive passion of the child who only thinks of glory and doesn’t yet appreciate the pain. He mumbled some places I’d not heard of, finally mentioning another familiar place, Passchendaele. I asked him what it was like to have been a soldier. He looked at me sadly and with a finality I could not challenge, and said, simply, ‘Passchendaele was the worst.’

It is perhaps impossible for a child to properly appreciate that their parents, let alone their grandparents, were ever young. Even now, as a middle-aged woman, when I look at the photos of Sam and Bert as old men and compare them with the rare images of them as young men I still can’t quite believe it. As I reconsider that memory of Bert talking in such an understated, taciturn manner about being at Passchendaele, the place that has become the icon of that war’s beastliness, I find it harder still. For any creature – man or beast – to have lived through that is surely impossible. On 18 July 1917, the British and Canadian forces began laying down a barrage that, come the initial assault on 31 July, had expended four and a quarter million shells. That autumn of 1917, the naturally high water-table of Flanders was tipped into disaster by constant bombardment and unseasonal levels of rain. It was the season of the war when if the shells and the bullets didn’t get you, the bottomless shell holes would. To step off the duckboards could spell death. Man and beast would simply be sucked under.

There is that famous photo of Canadian machine gunners in the wasteland of the battlefield. At first you can barely distinguish them from the landscape. It is as if it is absorbing them, their sodden, muddy uniforms becoming simply another feature of the broken ground. The gunners have no real identity anymore. They have become the war and the war them. Which is another way of registering the thought, ‘How could any human being have been in that place and remained a human being?’ And somehow I find it even more bewildering to think of a young man, even with military training, cast into that. Bert would have been barely twenty-one years old when he experienced Passchendaele. And, yes, the young are resilient and capable of the most extraordinary things perhaps precisely because they are discovering the world for the first time. The world had grown very old by the autumn of 1917 and the likes of Bert had long since lost their innocence. He was no virgin to violence. The older I get, however, the less I can comprehend how any of those young men did not completely collapse. It is true that there were quiet sectors in the Great War:6 it is also true that men were fed in and out of the line reasonably frequently, but all writers seem to agree that the Ypres Salient – which Passchendaele was supposed to break (and barely shifted from late 1914 till 1918) – was constantly ‘hot’. And in October 1917 it became, as a result of unseasonal weather, the iconic quagmire of our most terrible imaginings.

I think of my nephews – young men, or soon to become young men – and know they might choose a military career. They might be trained in the instruments of violence and be sent to ‘foreign fields’. But they are children to me. When we are young we think we are so grown up, but I look at Mike and Alex or Sam and Tom and they seem barely formed. I cannot imagine throwing Mike, good strong lad that he is, into the vile fields of Flanders. And yet he is practically the same age as Bert was when he saw too much. To develop the character to live life well is a lifetime’s work and youths like Bert saw more than those of us who have grown old or middle-aged in the privileged ‘West’ have ever seen. Somewhere in the midst of that truth lies a mystery. For surely any sane person would be desperate to spare not only their loved ones, but anyone the knowledge of war’s vileness. Yet the fact that men like Bert came home and found some way, any way, to take up the threads of a lost life is deeply moving. Indeed, more than that, part of our call to remember them lies in the truth that they faced the impossible and, whether they were killed or physically maimed or emotionally shattered, they found some way to carry on. In most act for the good.

In the piles of photographs of family weddings and Christenings and holidays, among that family catalogue of bad hairdos, uncomfortable uncles, and (to borrow a phrase of Larkin’s) ‘rapidly re-adjusted ties’ is a spotted blotched photo of a group of uniformed men driving a piece of artillery across a sepia wasteland. My dad tells me this is a picture of his dad, yet he doesn’t know which of the figures in the landscape he is. Grandad could be the one on the second right. He could be any one of these men. Geoff Dyer, in his classic study of the Great War and visual culture, draws out how the war supplied a series of myths which every family and soldier got caught up in. So, for example, my dad tells the story about how grandad had this pocket watch, which he’d lent to his best mate John Godwin in the trenches. The pocket watch, I was told, saved John Godwin’s life, a bullet just bounced off. As a child I lapped it up. Only later did I realise that all families had this story, either a pocket watch or Bible saving someone’s life. It was everyone’s story. My grandad could be any of the men in the photo. He could be any soldier. He could be anyone’s grandad.7

This is the extract from Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God by Rachel Mann, out on February 23 in paperback, priced £12.99

 

1. Though, as we’ve discovered since, both Bert and Sam’s army records were among the 60% completely destroyed in the Blitz of 1940.

2. See Blythe’s classic 1969 study Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village for a passionate and moving study of (Eastern-) English village life, some of whose inhabitants’ experiences were shaped in and around the Great War. 

3. For an utterly haunting reflection on the dissonance and connections between rural life and trench life listen to ‘Home, Lad, Home’ by folk duo Belshazzar’s Feast on 2010 album, Find the Lady. As the song unfolds – in a trench in Flanders – a whole way of rural life seems to unpick itself.

4.  When I found out that he’d been in the ‘Labour Corps’ I thought, ‘as a pioneer maybe he wasn’t that exposed to the fighting.’ Then I discovered that this section of the army, which came into existence in the last section of the war, exposed men who – as a result of serious wounds were no longer quite fit for the front line – to potentially horrific conditions just behind (and sometimes in front of) the Front Line.

5. In particular, ‘The Lads in their Hundreds’, captures both a pre-war pastoral, yet seems to foreshadow the War. The text is ostensibly about young men coming into Ludlow for a fair, but in its talk of ‘the lads that will die in their glory and never be old’ and who will carry the truth to the grave, it seems to prefigure the violence to come. This does reflect the fact that Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad in the shadow of the Second Boer War, but Butterworth’s music and, indeed, his death on the Somme in 1916 bring out new resonances to the text.

6. For a revealing account of the Live and Let Live System which emerged in some parts of The Line, see Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914–18: The Live and Let Live System (London: Pan, 2000). Desultory action was undertaken for the sake of a relatively quiet life. In those sectors, established troops would often fear the arrival of elite units – from either side – whose professionalism or regimental spirit would lead to the battle becoming ‘hot’.  

7. For a masterful meditation on the generic myths of the war – a Bible or watch saving a life – and the (synechdochal) way his own grandfather represents all grandfathers, see Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). This book has exercised a huge influence over my own. At times it has functioned as a vade mecum for the path I’ve sought to follow.